ANDREAS AASE (Department of Music, NTNU): DOCUMENTATION

Transcription

ANDREAS AASE
(Department of Music, NTNU):
DOCUMENTATION AND REFLECTION,
“IMPROVISATION IN SCANDINAVIAN
TRADITIONAL GUITAR”
The National Norwegian Artistic Research
Fellowship Programme,
October 2009
TABLE OF CONTENTS
WRITTEN INTRODUCTION
What is this?………………………………………………………….
What is this not?………………………………………………………
Who am I and why am I doing this?…………………………………
How will I do this?…………………………………………………..
Language……………………………………………………………….
Notation………………………………………………………………...
Ethics………………………………………………………………….
How to review this project……………………………………………
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MP3 CD # 1
DISCURSIVE ELEMENTS
Norwegian traditional music: A brief overview……………………
Background…………………………………………………………….
INSTRUMENTS: Fiddles…………………………………………….
Langeleik……………………………………………………………….
Harps…………………………………………………………………
Other stringed instruments……………………………………………
Wind instruments………………………………………………………
Local roots……………………………………………………………..
Drums…………………………………………………………………
Other instruments………………………………………………………
Playing together………………………………………………………..
Playing techniques……………………………………………………..
General features………………………………………………………..
Improvisation: A few perspectives…………………………………..
Two giants……………………………………………………………...
Background: Language, philosophy and silent knowledge……………
Shaping a musical dialect………………………………………………
Improvisation and cognitive psychology………………………………
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NEW FOUNDATIONS
Learning the guitar bouzouki…………………………………………..
Learning and arranging tunes: Work process………………………….
“Grenseslått”…………………………………………………………..
“Springleik etter Elling Holstad”………………………………………
“Halling etter Lars Voldøyhaug”………………………………………
“Westberg”……………………………………………………………..
“Polka Dalakopa”……………………………………………………...
“Ril” (Sound only)……………………………………………………..
“Reinlender 122”………………………………………………………
“Bruremarsj fra Brekstad”……………………………………………..
“Reinlender etter Lapp-Nils og Harald Gillan”……………………….
“Gropen”……………………………………………………………….
“Springleik etter Ole Berge”…………………………………………..
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“F-during fra Inndal”………………………………………………….
“Ellein” (Sound only)…………………………………………………
“Springar etter Harald Gillan”………………………………………...
“Polska etter Lapp-Nils og Harald Gillan”……………………………
“Springleik etter Olav Nilsen”………………………………………...
“Halling etter Hilmar Alexandersen”…………………………………
“Ørsalpols”……………………………………………………………
“Polsdans etter Hilmar Alexandersen”………………………………..
“Gropen” (Sap flute Version)…………………………………………
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PHRASE TREATMENTS
Melodic Motivs: A quick perspective………………………………...
Phrase Treatments: Process explanation……………………………...
Phrase # 1……………………………………………………………..
Phrase # 2 …………………………………………………………….
Phrase # 3 …………………………………………………………….
Phrase # 4 …………………………………………………………….
Phrase # 5 …………………………………………………………….
Phrase # 6 …………………………………………………………….
Phrase # 7 …………………………………………………………….
Phrase # 8 …………………………………………………………….
Phrase # 9 …………………………………………………………….
Phrase # 10……………………………………………………………
Phrase # 11……………………………………………………………
Phrase # 12……………………………………………………………
Phrase # 13……………………………………………………………
Phrase # 14……………………………………………………………
Imitating fiddle ornaments……………………………………………..
Imitating wind instrument ornaments …………………………………
Norwegian drumming, revisited………………………………………
Interlude: Live recording, May 2008………………………………….
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MP3 CD 2
RHYTHMIC EXPANSIONS
Composite phrase………………………………………………………
Five figure idea………………………………………………………...
Five phrase……………………………………………………………..
Five phrase # 2…………………………………………………………
Five phrase # 3…………………………………………………………
Seven figure idea………………………………………………………
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MELODIC EXPANSIONS
Bitonal Phrase…………………………………………………………
Minor Third Idea…………………………………………………….…
Jupiter Phrase…………………………………………………………
Brasilia Phrase……………………………………………………….
Brasilia (Excerpt, 3:44)………………………………………………
From Elise: The Vocal Tradition of Elise Flaten………………………
Ak, Mon Jeg Staar I Naade……………………………………………
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FUMBLING EXERCISES
Fumbling Exercise # 1…………………………………………………
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INFLUENCES
Influences: Martin Hayes and Dennis Cahill………………………….
Influences: Pat Metheny and Charlie Haden…………………………..
Influences: Ale Möller…………………………………………………
Influences: Anouar Brahem……………………………………………
Influences: Bill Frisell…………………………………………………
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CONTEXT
Context: Jan Garbarek………………………………………………….
Context: Sonics, timbe and the current Norwegian scene…………….
Context: Scandinavian contemporaries………………………………...
Context: Geography and music………………………………………...
Adjoining projects……………………………………………………...
Reflection: Improvisations, April 2009………………………………..
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Conclusions and further ideas………………………………………….
Senpolska etter Kristina Moberg………………………………………
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Appendix 1: Communication in the course of the project…………….
Appendix 2: Networking……………………………………………….
Appendix 3: References………………………………………………..
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Aknowledgements……………………………………………………...
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WRITTEN INTRODUCTION
What is this?
A lot of music I have listened to contains a large amount of improvisation. It
has struck me that even in the improvised sections of the kinds of music I
like, it´s possible to tell roughly what kind of music is going on. I don´t
think the choice of improvisational material in these forms of music is
totally instinctive – there are probably individual building blocks such as
melodic phrases and rhythmic contours that constitute a musical language
that is genre-specific for improvisers.
My main problem: Is it possible to build a way of improvising that sounds
traditionally Norwegian?
What is this not?
Academic dissertations often look into several texts on the same issue,
critique them by pitting them against each other, and bring forward a new
perspective of the field in question (“this person has done this or that piece
of work, and the answer to that needs to be…”). Since I´m required to relate
to the discursive sides of my field, I choose to discuss a select few academic
texts, but without ambitions to create academic work myself. I don´t think
performing musicians practice source critique in the academic sense either,
but gather influences instead, and establish new platforms of expression in a
hunter-gatherer process. Consequently, I think I need to meet the demands
for contextualization not through interdisciplinary theoretical art theory, but
rather by naming my musical influences, showing what I have borrowed
from whom.
Some schools of expression, such as visual art, concern themselves with
contemporary relevance (“this work is irrelevant for our times, because….
so I´ll do this instead”). Revolts and revolutions happen in music too, of
course, but perhaps they belong more in the popular music field, driven by
sociological circumstances, or in extemporal art music, where people aim for
aesthetic-avantgardist achievements.
My project is simply based on the assumption that Norwegian traditional
music doesn´t contain as much improvisation as other kinds of music, and I
have a few ideas about how to look into that.
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Visual artists I have met seem to work in an ongoing dialogue with theory.
In the community I come from, musicology stands quite a bit apart from
most of the performers and composers I know. Though I´ll give very brief
overviews of Norwegian traditional music and of some themes currently
being discussed around improvisation, the common use of the word “theory”
among musicians concerns how the music is put together, and I´ll stick to
that understanding for the main part of my effort.
I don´t aim to capture every aspect of Norwegian traditional music, its
history or the debates in and around it. Rather, I will give a very brief
overview of development lines and the current state as I perceive it, and
narrow down my source material to my own geographical area. For
example; I´ll show that I´ve looked into some ornamentation techniques, but
not all - just enough to develop my playing style in an even more Norwegian
direction. Nor will I adapt to the many microtonalities present in the source
material I´m drawing from; My chosen instrument approximates equal
temper, and goes out of tune if I try to bend strings as I would on electric
guitar.
I can´t possibly capture every aspect of what improvisation is, either. My
fascination for Ravi Shankar, for example, could lead me into long
excursions about Indian music. I´ll try to come across as mindful of the
world outside my own culture, and I´ll show a few examples of other forms
of music I work with that are related to this project – but I´ll stop there.
Who am I and why am I doing this?
I´m trained as an all-round musician on acoustic and electric instruments
within the guitar family: I consider myself a good blues player, my pop and
rock skills are good if a little outdated since the early nineties, my
knowledge of Brazilian music is slowly becoming adequate for professional
use, I can scrape by in simple jazz settings, and I´ve dabbled in African
forms.
The only thing I can confidently say I´m better at than my local peers is
playing steel-strung acoustic guitar alone, carrying melody, harmony and
bass functions without accompaniment. Since around 1997, I have taken an
interest in Norwegian music, and I am, strangely enough, to my knowledge
the first guitarist in the Trøndelag area to do so. That makes me a grown-up
newcomer, so I don´t harbour ambitions to become a traditional-music
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master of authenticity in this lifetime. What I´ve been doing in my everyday
musical life is to arrange traditional music from Trøndelag for acoustic
guitar, and write some music that I hope sounds related to it.
Working from my hometown of Trondheim, Norway, I´m surrounded by
jazz musicians of all ages, because the local university (NTNU) has a very
successful jazz department. I don´t have the talent or the inspiration to play
jazz on a high level myself. But I´ve always loved improvisation in music
from Arabic, Caribbean, Pacific and Indian cultures, for example, and for
some time now I´ve wanted to develop an improvisational voice that comes
from some other place than jazz – specifically, from my immediate
geographical surroundings.
This project is my chance to try to do just that.
How will I do this?
My method for changing my instinctual preferences as an improviser goes
something like this:
- Recording a lot of traditional tunes in personal sessions with
folk musicians, mainly my secondary supervisor,
- Internalizing them vocally,
- Internalizing them instrumentally,
- Elaborating (arranging) them instrumentally,
- Extracting and imitating musical elements I think are genrespecific (style markers), with main emphasis on melodic
profiles and secondary emphasis on ornaments,
- Expanding the use of these elements rhythmically as taught to
me by my main supervisor,
- Expanding the use of these elements melodically as taught to
me by my main supervisor,
- Expanding the use of these elemements harmonically as taught
to me by my main supervisor.
- Composing material for a small ensemble (loosely inspired by
Norwegian and Swedish traditional music) that contains
sections conducive to improvisation,
- Combining the resulting improvisational building blocks into –
hopefully – coherent solos on my recorded final presentation.
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- Submitting a handful of written and spoken-word essays sprinkled with musical examples - that clarify the relation to
musicology, reflect on the process in a self-critical manner, and
hopefully show that I´m reasonably well informed about what
goes on in my field.
All of these processes go on simultaneously, and the written representation
above makes the process seem a lot tidier and more chronological than it
actually is.
Language
Most of my written and spoken-word texts are written first, then recorded.
When the project moves into executing music, some of the interjected
reflections are spoken first, then transcribed, in a dictaphone-like fashion.
This captures self-observation in the moment, but the language will suffer
from time to time. My apologies beforehand.
Notation
I relate to music primarily as something I can hear, so I´ll stay away from
sheet music except for the guitar bouzouki arrangements of traditional tunes,
and the “fumbling excercises”.
Pols and springar / springleik tunes are notated in 9/8 rather than the tripletstrewn 3/4. It seems more logical to me as I play the notation back in my
notation program. I will refer to this rhythm as both 3/4 and 9/8, but always
with a name (such as pols) to avoid confusion.
Ethics
All informants have been made of aware of when my portable recorder is on.
The musicians in my ensemble and the external actors such as producers and
studio engineers have been paid in agreed-upon fashion, and the same goes
for my instrument builder. I´ve tried to the best of my ability to keep my
supervisors up to date in my work at all stages.
Sound examples are taken either from my record collection or from legal
download sites such as i-Tunes. Some sound examples I needed aren´t
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commercially available, so I´ve had to transfer sound from web pages such
as YouTube in a few cases.
How to review this project
A) Documentation and reflection: You should find two CDs in the back
of this booklet containing spoken-word recordings of the text you
have in front of you at any given time, interspersed with musical
examples. You will need a CD player that can read mp3 format. I
have chosen this experimental, “radio”-like form of documentation so
you don´t have to jump between the page and the CD player. You
should, in theory, be able to review all of this purely by listening. The
numbers in the written text from here on should correspond with the
numbers in the playlists of the two mp3 CDs. The headlines in
CAPITAL LETTERS is what I consider essential listening. The smallletters headlines contain mostly exercises, in all keys, of ideas already
presented. These exercises are not intended as essential listening but
are here to show what the main volume of work consists of for
musicians like myself – not writing about the music, but doing the
music.
B) Status at the beginning of my work: You will also find a DVD entitled
“Andreas Aase Liga Live at Dokkhuset”. This is a concert recording
at the very start of my work, and is included here to give you an
impression of what I was doing before most of the methodical work
began. If you need to prioritize, this DVD is of secondary importance.
C) Result at the end of my work: This is the DVD-shaped box containing
a “normal” audio CD entitled “Andreas Aase (Department of Music,
NTNU):Final artistic presentation,The National Norwegian Artistic
Research Fellowship Programme, October 2009”.
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MP 3 CD # 1
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DISCURSIVE ELEMENTS
1. NORWEGIAN TRADITIONAL MUSIC: A BRIEF OVERVIEW
(30:19)
(Sound example: “Polsdans etter Karl Alexandersen”, played on fiddle and
flute by Hilmar Alexandersen and Geir Egil Larsen)
In the following lines I am deeply indebted to Bjørn Aksdal and Sven
Nyhus´ book “Fanitullen”, which is a Norwegian traditional music primer.
This section is useful if you need to familiarize yourself with Norwegian
music on a basic level.
Background
After the Enlightenment phase of the late 1700s, some civilization critics
such as Jean-Jaques Rousseau voiced concerns for the human condition in
the face of industrial alienization and new forms of repression, and his
slogan “back to nature” became all the rage among nobility and bourgeosie
who had never performed manual labour for a second of their lives. Johan
Gottfried Herder brought to bear loose ideas of a “national golden age” that
still existed within every man (women don´t seem to be mentioned a lot) as
remnants in the shape of “folk poetry” and “folk music”. This interestfrom-a-distance led scholars to collect and preserve cultural expressions
from rural environments, and composers to assimilate (or steal, depending
on the eye of the beholder) musical elements for “artistic development”.
Later on this cultural capital was also used for nation-building purposes, as
in the case of Norway.
However, the open-ended nature of the field generated the need for a
scientific definition of “traditional music”. Based on Cecil Sharp´s
discussions about continuity, variation, and selection, the International Folk
Music Council (IFMC) set down in 1954 that the factors shaping orally
transmitted music are continuity, variation and selection.
There seems to be an agreement that traditional music was from the outset
functional music – it filled functions that pop culture has to a certain extent
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taken over in our day and age. And this pop culture, as Nyhus and Aksdal
point out so relevantly, often has deep roots in traditional music.
Since World War II the regional and dialect-based differences have taken
over as contextual premise from the nation-building unification project1.
This is partly due to the temporary monopolization of national symbols by
the national socialists, but the local interest in prominent musicians,
knowledge of tunes, lineage of traditions and dialects within and outside
music all seem to have much older roots in Norway than the 1940s.
It is generally believed that left to the free market, the indigenous strands of
traditional music will be eradicated over time, and that organizational
discourse is vital to keeping tradition alive. This sets traditionality and
traditionalism apart as an activity, as different from tradition as a mere
descriptive term. This is the reason musicians in this field are occupied with
questions of age, lines of tradition, and continuity.
My own role as a performing musician in the project I am about to undertake
will not touch upon these very central issues. I will adapt musical material
that my informants consider to be essential repertoire and performance
practices, and process this material improvisationally.
(Sound example: “Polsdans etter Karl Alexandersen” – Hilmar
Alexandersen and Geir Egil Larsen)
INSTRUMENTS
Fiddles
The earliest unequivocal reports of fiddling in Norway stem from the late
1600s, and in the following century it gained massive popularity. The idea of
sympathetic strings gradually emerged towards the end of the 17th century.
Religious revivals, as well as competition from the accordeon, threatened the
fiddle´s existence towards the late 1800s, and contests were initiated to help
preserve the tradition. Interest remained low until the 1970s.
The oldest hardanger fiddle in existence is the 1651 Jaastad fiddle from
Hardanger itself. The sympathetic strings may be an influence from Scotland
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I will touch upon this theme later in the essay called “Context: Geography and Music”.
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by way of England from India. In the late 18th century, most of southwestern
Norway was hardanger fiddle territory, and the Telemark region in the south
began building its own variants around this time as well. The first half of the
1800s is considered a golden age for the dissemination and perfection of the
hardanger fiddle and its music, and the mythical fiddler Myllarguten
introduced the instrument to the bourgeoisie in Christiania in 1849, heavily
promoted by classical virtouso Ole Bull. After 1860 the modern hardanger
fiddle, with a violin-like shape and four, later five, sympathetic strings
became the norm under the production standards of the Helland family. In
Setesdal, the common practice for a while was to modify regular fiddles
instead of importing hardanger ones, and some fiddlers even sang while
playing.
(Sound example: “Huldreslått, gangar from Setesdal” – Slinkombas)
As a result of national romanticism and organized concerts by virtousos
during the first half of the twentieth century the hardanger fiddle became
widespread all over the southern half of Norway. Hilmar Alexandersen from
Steinkjer in Trøndelag was a typical master musician in that he commanded
both fiddles. At the time of writing, there seems to be a rough geographic
division between the two types of fiddles, with the hardanger fiddle
dominating the southwest.
Langeleik
(Sound example: Hilde Rudi Bråten: “Langeleikvals”)
This dulcimer-like horizontal instrument appeared in the early 1500s in
Norway, and by the seventeenth century it could be found as far north as
Finnmark. The oldest specimen had four to six strings and were excavated
from one lump of wood. Instrument builder Øystein Rudi´s production in the
late 1800s and early 1900s defined the instrument as having eight strings, the
tuning pegs on the one end, two fretted melody strings and a tempered
chromatic scale. The deepest droning strings have gone from sounding out a
fifth to a major triad. In musical terms, langeleik performers have played
both in the dance rhythms such as halling and springar, as well as slower
listening subgenres such as klokkeslåtter and huldreslåtter.
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Harps
Two types of harps were widely used in medieval-time Europe: the arched
roman and the straight-gothic. The former was probably most common in
Norway, and is reported from weddings and other festivities throughout the
seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The latter, sometimes
called krokharp in Norway, was used in Southwestern and middle Norway
until the mid-1800s, when it seems to have vanished from the musical map.
Since 1980 there has been a resurgence of interest in harps, and our most
famous performer is perhaps Tone Hulbækmo.
(Sound example: Tone Hulbækmo: “På Snei”)
Other stringed instruments
The hammered dulcimer (hakkebrett) and hurdy-gurdy (dreielire) had their
heyday in the 1600s, and the nyckelharpa (keyed fiddle) only had a brief
appearance in the 1700s before it became the most prominent Swedish
traditional instrument. Fiddlers have traditionally used mandolins for
practice, and citterns, guitar and piano, as well as gamba, cello and double
bass have been used for ensemble playing.
(Sound example: Annbjørg Lien playing nyckelharpa on “Loki”)
Wind instruments
Findings from around A.D.1500 indicate that the bronze lur was a dronebased instrument played two at a time in ceremonial circumstances. Later in
history, as herding and hunting developed, various lurs and horns have
played a role in scaring off predators and for communication between
humans. Finger holes were added to the horns for melodic playing, and
permutations such as the ram´s horn played with a trumpet-like
embouchoure eventually became common.
(Sound example: “Folketone frå Valdres, played on ram´s horn by Olav
Snortheim)
Flutes have probably developed from small instruments imitating bird calls
and other nature sounds. Composer Eivind Groven brought the willow pipe,
or sap flute, into wider recognition, and discussed the “Norwegian” tonality
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of the partial-tone scale in his written work. These instruments are based on
stopping the air at the end with one fingertip, and manipulating air pressure.
Hans Fredrik Jacobsen, Steinar Ofsdal and jazz saxophonist Jan Garbarek
are some of our most well-known practitioners, and Geir Egil Larsen also
employs his specimen from time to time.
(Sound example: “Halling etter Hilmar Alexandersen”, played on sap flute
by Geir Egil Larsen)
The centuries have seen military bands introducing the transverse (sideblown) flute to Norwegians, and tin whistles have also emerged, but the
dominant flute category is the edge-based recorder type. These finger-hole
flutes were initially made out of bone, but from the early 1700s onwards the
German influence of wooden recorder flutes is evident, as seen in the word
tussefløyte, derived from tyskfløyte (“german flute”). Microtonalities seem to
have emerged as elsewhere in Norwegian music: a slightly raised fourth,
semi-high sixth, and a slightly lowered seventh. Gradually, the function of
these flutes went from herding to melody playing intended for dancing and
listening, and Egil Storbekken was an important revivalist of the recorder
flute tradition in the 1970s.
(Sound example: “Pols fra Nord-Østerdal” played by Egil Storbekken on
recorder flute)
The French chalumeau led to the introduction of reed-based clarinets around
1750. They became popular very quickly because of on-call military
musicians, who boosted their income by playing dances and weddings.
Trøndelag became a place of development for indigenous clarinet
permutations, which may explain the many tunes in Bb. Harald Gillan from
Meråker and his friends in the mining community of Kopperå revitalized the
clarinet from the 1950s, and a few tunes from his repertoire will show up
later in my project.
(Sound example: “Sprengar etter Lapp-Nils og Harald Gillan”, played on
Meråker clarinet by Geir Egil Larsen).
When religious revivals swept across Norway in the second half of the
nineteenth century, fiddles and fiddlers were largely condemned. The
accordeon seemed to enjoy greater tolerance, and since its beginnings in
Asia through Germany and Austria, it became very popular on these shores.
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Scepticism prevails to this day, due to increased business competiton for
fiddlers, a newer dance repertoire from Europe that threatened to eradicate
the older dance tunes, and an overall tonality that was very international in a
time of increasing nationalism. Taking a more collaborative route,
accordeonists Ole Wenge and Oddvar Nygaard developed a characteristic
way of playing alongside fiddlers, and from the 1950s onwards this has
evolved into a band format commonly described as gammaldans (“old
dance”).
(Sound example: “Reinlender”, played by “Over Stok og Steen”)
Local roots
The raw material I use comes from the Trøndelag area in Norway. The main
figure in the Innherred region was Hilmar Alexandersen, who lived for the
greater portion of the twentieth century, and whose effortless and pitchperfect playing drew on old dance tunes as well as entertainment music from
Europe. Many of the older tunes have traveled back and forth between
Sweden and Norway, and the mythical fiddler Lapp-Nils is mentioned often
as a distant historical source for common tunes.
Transcriptions by Albert Moen and Petter Benum were probably also central
to Alexsandersen´s repertoire, and the tunebook was passed on to Geir Egil
Larsen and onwards to Geir Egil´s sons Einar Olav and Gjermund. Sturla
Eide, who represents the Orkdal traditions from further west, has put a lot of
work into interpreting the notations that exist after Elling Holstad, a
farmhand who had his fiddling heyday in the mid-1800s.
Drums
Drumming has been present in weddings and other ceremonies since the
early 1600s, though its roots are much older. Many cities employed
drummers, and once again military bands were important. Bergen-based
drummer Johannes Sundvor collected many drum tunes in the early 1900s,
and his work has been updated and revised by Carl Haakon Waadeland
(more of whom later) and Birger Mistereggen. Though the usual dance
rhythms prevail, many tunes are in odd meters such as 5/8, 7/8 or 9/8.
According to Sundvor, the old drummers differed between “major” and
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“minor” tunes, referring to the distribution of accents between the right and
the left hand.
(Sound example: “Bryllupsslått fra Hålandsdalen”, played by Carl Haakon
Waadeland)
Other instruments
Bag pipes have had a small role in Norwegian traditional music, but the
Jew´s harp (munnharpe), represented by performers such as Hallgrim Berg
and Bjørgulv Straume, have reached great popularity since the 1960s
revival. In the 1800s, it probably served as a temporary “storage space” for
fiddle repertoire that couldn´t be performed due to the aforementioned
religious condemnation.
(Sound example: “Sortebergen”, played on Jew´s harp by Hallgrim Berg)
Playing together
We´re a soloist-loving people. But of course, playing together has always
been important, as evidence from the 1600s onwards reveals. Back then, two
fiddles playing in thirds, or one fiddle/some bass instrument playing melody
and bassline respectively were the most common constellations.
From the late 1700s, three kinds of interplay start to dominate. Seconding
means accompanying the melody with simple rhythm patterns, usually on
the offbeats. Octave playing whole tunes or in sections of the tune was also
heard.
(Sound example: “Kalvøyvals”, played by Einar Olav and Gjermund Larsen,
fiddles)
Playing in parallel thirds or sixths, in an improvised or arranged fashion,
was also common. This may be a loan from European baroque music, and
disappeared for a while in the 1800s.
(Sound example: “Barsengvalsen”, played by Einar Olav and Gjermund
Larsen, fiddles)
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Around the middle of the nineteenth century, accompanying instruments
such as the citer (dulcimer) and guitar emerge along with harmoniums and
organs, but the most important feature of this national romantic period is the
growing cult around hardanger fiddle virtousos and their solo recitals.
Classical violinist Ole Bull´s exposure of the legendary fiddler Myllarguten,
as well as composer Edvard Grieg´s utilization of traditional tunes, led to a
back-and forth dynamic between low and high culture, and this is when
hardanger fiddle playing became meticilously rehearsed and refined.
Sigbjørn Bernhoft Osa, Hallvard T. Bjørgum and Knut Buen are only a few
names from this mighty musical heritage in Norwegian culture.
(Sound example: “Fanitullen”, played by Knut Buen on hardanger fiddle)
Starting between the two world wars, and continuing onwards to this day,
the Spelemannslag movement created a community-based homogenization
of larger fiddle ensembles. The leaders of these bands often often pay
attention to coordinating the placement of bowstrokes and other details, and
members less skilled have simpler functions, accompanying highly
proficient fiddlers.
(Sound example: “Snar å Ta Åt, Pols”, played by Glåmos Spelemansslag)
The 1960s and –70s saw two main trends in the traditional music
communities in Norway. Neo-traditionalists such as Ånon Egeland and Per
Midtstigen revitalised partly forgotten tunes and instruments (flutes, organs
and diatonic two-row accordeons, for example).
(Sound example: “Hambor frå Gjerstad”, played on accordeon and fiddle by
Ånon Egeland and Per Midtstigen)
On the other side of the spectrum, rock musicians teamed up with traditional
forces to create a Norwegian answer to the British folk rock bands such as
Fairport Convention.
(Sound example: “Reinlender”, played by Folque)
The 1980s saw the emergence of the globalized world music paradigm,
where African and Latin American sounds in particular came into fashion in
cross-cultural collaborations, sometimes aided by the emerging sampling
technology.
18
(Sound example: “Halling Jorond”, played by Kirsten Bråten Berg, Solo
Cissokho, Bjørgulv Straume and Kouame Sereba)
During the 1970s and –80s, jazz musicians also took a greater interest in
traditional music, more of which elsewhere. In the late 1990s and early
2000s, a second wave of folk rock saw the band Gåte (“riddle”) achieve
great success with their up-to-date use of technology and metal influences
paired with singer Gunhild Sundli´s knowledge of older vocal traditions.
(Sound example: “Følgje”, played by Gåte)
Playing Techniques
Sven Nyhus writes that fiddlers in older days used to put their instruments
on their chest, like some baroque and renaissance musicians. The
instrument´s weight thus rested in the left hand rather than between the chin
and the shoulder, and most tunes consequently had to stay within one lefthand position during whole sections.
Open-string drones (above or below the melody) and double stops have been
used a lot to create great projection, whereas glissando as an expressive
remedy seems to have vanished in the 1970s.
Ornaments are an integral part of Norwegian fiddling. Grace notes before
and after the melody note, trills and double hits are just some of the tools
that have been developed by individual performers. I`ll return to this in the
sections about imitating fiddle and flute ornaments.
(Sound example: “Hallingstugu”, played on hardanger fiddle by Sven
Nyhus)
The bowstroke techniques that shape Norwegian fiddling constitute a big
field of study. As I start assimilating my informants´ playing style, I will try
to incorporate or discard imitations as I go along, but it´s worth keeping in
mind that I play guitar, not fiddle. For me as a guitar player, it´s probably
more relevant to display how the most common dance forms are reflected in
the basic plectrum rhythms of the langeleik, which I will here play on a
Hawaiian Weissenborn guitar. X means strumming away from your body, V
means strumming towards your body:
19
(Sound example:
- Halling X V X V
- Springar, pols: X X V
- Waltz: X V V
- Reinlender: X V X V)
You will hear many other dance rhythms as well in Norway, such as polkas
and mazurkas. But the four rhythms you just heard underpin most of the
music I´ve received from my informants. Lullabies (bånsuller), slow tunes
borrowed from traditional singers (visetoner) and some religious tunes will
also appear in this project.
General features
The tunes are often named after certain musicians (“Sprengar etter Johannes
Brekken”, for example), or they may be linked up to areas where they have
been used (“Bruremarsj fra Brekstad”). With few exceptions, they consist of
two or three eight-bar sections that are repeated. Some halling tunes have
uneven time signatures, because this particular form of mostly individual
dancing is based on pulse rather than periods. Some regions have beats of
uneven lengths - it is a common perception, for example, that many pols
tunes from the Røros area have a “prolonged” second beat, but not everyone
agrees that this is what the performers feel themselves when they´re playing.
(Sound example: “Finnleken i Brekken”, played on hardanger fiddle by Tron
Steffen Westberg)
Rather than going further into relations between music and dance, or how
the various nuances and subgenres appear in different regions of Norway, I
recommend Aksdal´s and Nyhus´ book as further reading.
20
2. IMPROVISATION- A FEW PERSPECTIVES (29:45)
Two giants
(Sound example: “Patio Custodio”, played by Paco de Lúcia)
Andalúcian guitarist Paco de Lúcia is regarded as the world´s leading
flamenco musician, and I have always assumed that this kind of music is by
and large improvised. But his own reflections show how many meanings the
term itself can have:
“In the flamenco, we improvise in another sense, in another way, not
like in jazz music where the improvisation is more organized. There
you have a cycle of chords and this repeats while the soloist creates
parts over the changes. But in flamenco, we don’t have this. We don’t
have something prepared. We know that we are in bulerias, or
siguiriyas or solea, but it depends on the dancer or the singer. We
have to look at each other, to create in that moment what is
happening, and we improvise with that.”
His references to various dances is telling: The underlying rhythm is what
determines the excursions of the soloist and the ensemble, and that fact has
helped put me on track of what I want to do with Norwegian rhythms: To
improvise “in” pols, or “in” halling. It is also possible to understand de
Lúcia´s distanced attitude towards jazz, as it is mainly organized along chord
changes, like he says.
Indian music doesn’t concern itself with chord changes, either:
(Sound example: “Raga Sindhura”, played by Ravi Shankar)
Scales, melodic profiles, and an very big repertoire of rhythmic cycles taught
orally are some of the building blocks in this music. Each raga has a drone
foundation, and the sophistication is achieved between stringed instrument
soloist and percussionist, in this case sitar and tabla.
Shankar´s own reflections circle around the spiritual aspects of playing
music: the mood of the audience, the connection of each raga to the basic
sentiments in human nature, the inner realm the music can bring you to.
21
(Sound example: “Håvard Hedde”, played by Dag Arnesen trio)
Dag Arnesen is a highly skilled Norwegian jazz musician who on his record
“Norwegian Song” revisited the piano pieces and folk tunes of his youth.
Placed in a traditional jazz setting, his improvisations sound very pleasing to
my ears – but when I listen to the record, I find that the strategies of the jazz
piano trio (for example Bill Evans´ work) seems to shape the approach.
Eight-note runs slightly “behind the beat”, and chord changes leading the
soloist along over a bossa-nova-like rhythm, are distinctly jazz-related
methods, not Norwegian ones.
(Sound example: “Håvard Hedde”, played by Dag Arnesen trio, continued)
Background: Language, philosophy and silent knowledge
Turning to the Norwegian collection of essays simply titled “Improvisasjon”
from 2006, I find support for the idea that the word improvisation contains
different meanings for different individuals, in what Ketil Steinsholt calls
different contexts of expectation. Musicians from different corners of the
world have always put a lot of work into preparing a catalogue of phrases
and rhythmic motifs for later, instinctual use. Philosopher Theodore Adorno
was very critical towards jazz, and frequently referred to it as a big chunk of
worn-out clichés. Not only are his observations in my view deeply antisocial and Eurocentric, they aren´t even culturally sensitive enough to
despise other improvised traditions with the same demands for traditional
training.
Bjørn Alterhaug writes about how the roots of the word “improvisation”
probably go back to antiquity. Visus means “seen” in latin, pro means
“before”, and im means “not”. We´re left with the tentative translation not
seen before or, simply unpredicted. Aristotle considered improvisation a
welcome part of the process leading up to a defined work of art, but not a
part of the work itself, a view that would later be renewed by Friedrich
Nietzsche.
Medieval rethoric considered verbal improvisation a skill that could be
prepared, and several schools of gestures and other improvisational
movements was a part of the non-written passing on of knowledge.
22
Art music from the nineteenth century is generally considered to be the
period when the written page is the highest entity, and improvising church
organists are believed to have been an almost singular group of improvisers,
continuing the tradition of Händel, Bach and other masters. French
composer Olivier Messiaen´s music was a twentieth-century culmination of
this tradition.
(Sound example: “Marche Épiscopale”, organ improvisation by Louis
Vierne, played by Colin Walsh)
So “knowing and doing at the same time”, as Steinsholt calls it, is nothing
new in any of the art forms, nor is it exclusive to jazz music.
Sometimes there is even a problematic border line between composed and
improvised music: Trumpeters Louis Armstrong and Miles Davis were
happy to formalize some of their improvisations into compositions, with no
further comment. On the other side of the spectrum, many have tried to
reach total freedom for whole ensembles at the same time, going further and
further afield from the beginnings of collective improvisations in early New
Orleans jazz. The quest goes on, perhaps illustrating Jaques Derrida´s
deconstructionist observation of how total improvisation must always be
strived for – and how it will always remain an impossibility: once it´s out
there, it can be fixed in time and space.
(Sound example: “Song X”, played by Ornette Coleman)
Musicians represent silent knowledge. Despite the fact that I write and
record these essays, the fact remains that music is something that needs to be
done in order to be understood. Our way of understanding our field comes
into being as what Svein Halvard Jørgensen calls an action pattern, and our
knowledge is mainly stored in our bodies as intellectual memory, muscle
memory and sensitivity based on experience. If you play music, you´re part
of an action generator, or whatever term you prefer; musicians usually just
tell each other “you can play!” Language consequently plays a secondary
role in the transfer of most of the world´s musical knowledge, as Jørgensen
shows through examples from anthropology.
23
Shaping a musical dialect
(Sound example: “Texas Flood”, played by Stevie Ray Vaughan)
I will follow accepted musical conventions when I explore the possibilities
for creating improvisation strategies for guitar that sound Norwegian – this
is not a free improvisation project. From my spoken-word presentations, I´ve
learned that Stevie Ray Vaughan´s electric Texas blues guitar
improvisations, for example, are immediately identifiable to most people – if
not by name and region, then certainly as general style. That makes me think
that it´s possible to isolate melodic contours, rhythmic idiosyncracies,
timbral phenomena (how the music “rings out”) and other musical markers
from Norwegian traditional music, and use it as a basis for practice and
internalization. This knowledge will then be placed in the Norwegian dancerelated rhythmic frameworks parallel to the ones Paco de Lúcia discussed in
flamenco music.
Improvisation and cognitive psychology
(Sound example: “Showbiz”, played by Mike Stern)
The following is based on Jeff Pressing´s “Psychological constraints on
Improvisation”, a contribution to the anthology “In the Course of
Performance”, edited by Bruno Nettl and Melinda Russell2. I will also try to
link the articles´ subject matter to a case study of Mike Stern´s May 2008
concert at Dokkhuset, Trondheim.
(Sound example: “Showbiz”, played by Mike Stern, continued)
First of all, Pressing lays out the premise that Western musical cultures seem
to insist on the individual and innate meaning of the word “talent”. That is, a
certain aptitude for hearing musical relations as linked to a system,
instrumental dexterity, and some other basic abilities need to be in place in
order to encourage further pursuit of a musical career. I´ll concur with this,
but it needs to be said that “Western” is a word now redundant, given the
increased mixing up of cultures. The notion that anybody can reach a certain
2
Pressing´s article takes into account the potential of music therapy for the mentally
challenged on two occasions. Because I am completely devoid of knowledge in this field
I will stay away from it in my discussion.
24
level of musical competence is certainly present in the kindergardens and
schools in my own country, not to mention in the many immigrant cultures
whose methods and worldviews are being assimilated into mainstream
society as I write in the early 2000s. Pressing´s issue here, however, is the
cognitive field, and he moves on to introduce nuances in describing how
some prodigies never fulfil their promise, some workhorses blossom late in
life, and that the idea of innate musical talent does not apply as a globeencompassing model of understanding. There is, according to him, no way
of predicting who will succeed and who won´t within the performing arts.
In his discussion of the individual´s relation to music, Pressing moves on to
ask: Do personality types and field of activity correlate? Studies within
physics, biology, and psychology seem to show that researchers are more
emotionally unstable, self-sufficient, dominant, introverted and reflected
than teachers and administrators. No studies exist on Western improvisers,
but biographical accounts would indicate that some of the personality traits
mentioned above would be connected to their double role as real-time
composers and musical performers. I find it odd that the research material
quoted by Pressing doesn´t seem to take into account the many external
insecurities that come with the territory of being a probing researcher or
artist: Financial worries, the fear that what you do is irrelevant, anxiety that
somebody else somewhere else that you haven´t heard of is doing what you
do, only much better, the conviction that nobody will take an interest in what
you do (until maybe after you´re dead) – I dare to venture that these are all
known woes to the investigative soul whatever the chosen field of work.
What comes first, the restless soul or the work itself, is hard to tell.
Pressing then sheds some scientific light on the indications that different
musical abilities actually seem to be quite independent, as any musician will
know. Sight-reading, memorized performance, composition, and
improvisation are really different fields of competence, as is suggested by
examples of loss of subskills after neurological damage.
Some studies show similarities in pattern recognition and expectation
between non-expert listeners and expert performers, so we can safely
assume, according to the article, that improvising musicians and listeners
develop their system of musical codes together. A few days before writing
this, I attended a concert with guitarist Mike Stern and his quartet, and the
whole two-set event exemplified this performer-audience “joint venture”
very clearly in my view. Stern´s methods are now quite well-known to his
25
large international audience, and include features such as superimposition of
bebop lines over funk grooves, tonal/atonal sequensation of blues-based
lines over the same grooves, and (as you´re going to hear) introduction of
distortion halfway through his solos to lift the experience of climax,
(Sound example: “Tumble home”, played by Mike Stern)
Mike Stern will also typically introduce quotations from his tenure with
Miles Davis in his 1980s and 1990s´ ensembles. This is an example of what
he sounded like back then:
(Sound example: “Jean Pierre” by Miles Davis, solo by Mike Stern)
, and the last strategy I´m going to mention here in these jazz-rock
ensembles is a mutual ensemble understanding of afro-cuban rhythms
relocated to non-traditional points of emphasis (what musicians refer to as
“hiding the downbeat”) On the specific evening in question, the whoops and
cheers among the members of the audience (many of them part-time
musicians or non-musicians known to me), did not occur randomly, but were
tightly connected to the proceedings on-stage. American jazz musicians refer
to “hip” audiences, and thereby sum up quite simply that the crowd in front
of them have heard their records, and the records that lead up to them, in a
shared interpretation of codes from a small segment of music history. Since
this form of music has been coded to an exceptional degree since the early
1970s, this gig serves as a clear example of a subculture-specific context for
improvisation – it wouldn´t, to be blunt, take much musical or sonic
experimentation to bewilder me or any other audience member on the
specific evening in question.
(Sound example: “Tumble home”, played by Mike Stern, continued)
To get back to the psychological questions that are the subject for the article
I´m discussing, however, it is interesting to ask what goes on, in a cognitive
sense, within an improviser such as Mike Stern? Any musician will, given
some prodding, tell you that there are many listening and execution
processes going on at many levels at the same time. You have to hear what
everybody´s just done, are doing right now, and may be doing next, while
you take care of your own contribution. If one wants to stay clear of music
theory-specific terminology, the following passage from Pressing´s article
manages to take in almost every challenge in the art of real-time creation:
26
“…the improviser must effect real-time sensory and perceptual
coding, optimal attention allocation, event interpretation, decisionmaking, prediction (of the action of others), memory storage and
recall, error correction, and movement control, and further, must
integrate these processes into an optimally seamless set of musical
statements that reflect both a personal perspective on musical
organization and a capacity to affect listeners. Both speed and
capacity constraints apply. To circumvent these limitations, certain
tools are used, representing the results of deliberate practice. Only if
the coherence problem is addressed with a sufficiently powerful set of
skills and tools can the performer operate substantially on a high level
of musical thinking and interaction, exhibiting sensitivity to nuance,
context, development and reference structures.“
The author then moves on to employ some general psychological terms of
expertise to describe the boundaries an improviser may need to stay within.
The referent is another word used here for song form.
“The creation and selective frustration, delay, or confirmation of
expectancies may be a factor in creating musical emotion”.
In my own work, this can take the shape of improvising over the chords of a
tune I´ve written, such as “Jimbo”, or over the chords suggested by a
traditional tune.
(Sound example: Chord changes for “Jimbo”, programmed version)
Second, the knowledge base is another word used here for
“musical materials (for example chord voicings and phrases) and
excerpts, repertoire, subskills, perceptual strategies, problem-solving
routines, hierarchical memory structures and schemas, generalized
motor programs, and more”.
Elsewhere in my project, I describe how I extract melodic segments from
traditional tunes and practice them in modulated tonal variations, as well as
over different rhythmic pulses than they originally appear. This is but one
27
example of the knowledge base I try to establish. I refer the reader-listener to
the documentation of my practice processes to get examples of this.
Third, specialist memory is how all this information is stored in a hierarchy,
with the help of mnemonic aids:
“…memory experts go to a great deal of trouble to have handy coding
and “chunking” facilities available. The order of the information
needed to allow chunking is either discovered by analysis, or, if it is
not present, imposed by a personally meaningful correspondence
scheme (a repertoire of pattern reference and analysis routines). These
studies raise the possibility that special training may be able to
improve musical memory dramatically, with potentially powerful
effects on improvisation”.
In my case, this applies to (for example) the way I try to play phrases from
traditional tunes in new sequences every day – I´ll discover combinations of
phrases I like better than others, and some fall by the wayside. Motor
memory will join the way my inner ear will anticipate these phrase
combinations, and together they´ll form ways of remembering
improvisational routes.
Pressing commits an academic error, I think, in referencing one of his own
earlier works without explaining it sufficiently for the reader to understand –
or maybe I´m just having a hard time getting the hang of his thoughts on the
fourth point, generative and evaluative processes. What I can grasp is
evident from the expression itself; any trained performer or listener will
continously evaluate the material arising during a performance, and employ
a trained instinct for what further events can be triggered by what´s already
been played. Pressing´s own matrixes from 1988 are not represented in his
article, and the entire paragraph is to me a good example of the convoluted
wordiness used in scientific approaches to describe what musicians and
listeners will know and share already.
Point number five: Cultural constraints apply to an improviser´s trajectory,
such as
“musical styles, repertoire, effects of media, employment
opportunities, instrument types and availability, social status of
musicians, degree of incorporation of music in rituals and social
28
events, and so on. Specific improvisational constraints also occur,
such as the degree of developmental priming of improvisational
competence, the status given to creative or novel musical behavior,
and the size and number of societal subgroups that provide a
subculture of appreciation for real-time musical composition.”
As improvisation based on traditional music is itself an anomaly, I don´t feel
bound by cultural constraints in the research work itself, but good traditional
musicians will instinctively feel it when my playing loses touch with the
music it´s based on (and lose touch it will, that´s part of the trial-and-error
process). One of the fallacies in my project is that I´m not able to play for (or
with) dancers, so the lack of social events other than concerts take on an
almost non-ritual character. This flaw touches upon the whole debate on
whether the transition from social music to art music is beneficial to the
development of the genre one operates in, and is too extensive a subject
matter for my project. As far as instrument types go, I´ve been given the
chance to introduce an instrument not commonly heard in either the guitar or
folk music communities, and as for the status – I´m used to getting by with
little or no recognition in the culture-specific sense, which is an outsider role
probably familiar to most of the research fellows in the program I´m part of.
As I mentioned in regard to the Mike Stern concert, the expected (but
witheld) switching on of a distortion pedal mid-guitar-solo, the transition in
a drum solo from free time to a cascara pattern on cowbell and bass drum,
or any other tension-and-release trick in the jazz-rock textbook, illustrate a
code-specific way for performers of dealing with improvisation and
emotion, which is Pressing´s sixth point. Pressing´s article cites various
research indications that the phenomenon of expectation is the area most
easily researched, and adds that limitations may exist for certain instruments
more than others, though the results are as inconclusive as they must be.
Jaco Pastorius´ emergence as an electric bass player at the forefront of any
soundscape he contributed to in his short life proves the non-permanence of
such research, as nobody would have thought before his emergence on the
scene in the 1970s that the fretless electric bass could become a hallmark of
a whole genre the way it did.
(Sound example: “Donna Lee”, played on electric fretless bass by Jaco
Pastorius)
29
Jaco Pastorius´ version of Charlie Parker´s famous bebop tune “Donna Lee”
only goes to show that the field changes, as do the shared codes of affect.
The next point in Pressing´s article applies more to my project, however; the
social and collective nature of much music based on African and Arabic
forms. My hope is that the shared imprint of what traditional music is, taken
into an improvisational realm, will evoke sympathy and sense of place in my
listeners, and that the echoes I try to produce from, say, fiddle tunes, will be
clear enough to be perceived at some level – be it instinctive or theoretical in
the listener´s mind.
The final pages of Pressing´s article discusses the psychological phenomena
of expectation, tension and release in mainstream jazz harmony, but with
terms from cognitive psychology such as the notational coding of referents.
As I perceive this part of the article as purely observational of one specific
tradition of music, I will leave it up to others to create a cognition-based
survey of harmonic and melodic perception in Norwegian traditional music.
The same goes for the discussion of various forms of notation in various
traditions, as I try to illuminate my own thoughts and practices in notating
music elsewhere.
NEW FOUNDATIONS
3. LEARNING THE GUITAR BOUZOUKI –
PRESENTATION IN F (13:27)
The most important transformation in my research project is to switch from
regular six-string guitar to the guitar bouzouki. The guitar bouzouki was
purpose-built for me by Norwegian luthier Arnt Rian, and it´s tuned in four
pairs of unison strings, from bottom to top F, C, G, D, that is, a fifths tuning.
(Sound example: Guitar bouzouki, open strings)
I´ve chosen this instrument because I´ve realized that playing in fifths tuning
is much more conducive to fiddle music, and the fiddle is usually tuned in
fifths in the Trøndelag area. Although the fiddlers I use as source material
for my project usually tune their fiddles to “normal” violin tuning, that is,
30
from bottom to top G, D, A, E, I have chosen to go a full step lower on the
guitar bouzouki (I should actually be saying one octave and one whole step
lower).
There are two reasons for this. The first reason is that the fiddler I usually
play with, Sturla Eide, earlier used to play on a hardanger fiddle
(hardingfele) that accomodated the F tuning really well.
(Sound example: Sturla Eide playing “Den Blåstemte” by Sven Nyhus on
hardanger fiddle)
The other source of inspiration for tuning from F is American guitarist
David Lindley, whose bouzouki work centers around this tuning.
(Sound example: David Lindley playing “Afindrafindrao” on Irish
bouzouki)
I´ve been using an instrument like this earlier in my career – I´ve been
playing the Irish bouzouki for some years now – but up until this point I´ve
been using it to create arrangements of traditional tunes, and I´ve been
learning them verbatim, by heart, thus working in a manner more typical of
classical musicians. What´s needed at this point is for me to create a solid
overview of the instrument, or, specifically, of the fretboard – what my left
hand does – where I am at any given time, what notes I´m playing at any
given time.
Consequently, I´ve created a daily practice regimen which serves two
purposes: First of all, it´s a very good and extensive warm-up, which is
needed, since I spend a lot of hours every day hunched over my instrument.
Second, it serves as the building blocks I need to create a good overview of
my instrument.
The building blocks are as follows:
- Tonic, subdominant and dominant chords played on three string
pairs at the time, all over the neck. The starting key here is F.
(Sound example: Strummed I-IV-V chords, three string pair at the time)
- Next up is the F major scale played all over the fretboard over a
4/4 beat and a F/C drone underneath.
31
(Sound example: F major scale in 4/4)
- Using the same rhythmic foundation, I then practice all the
four-note diatonic arpeggios generated by the F major scale.
(Sound example: Four-note diatonic arpeggios in 4/4))
- I then proceed to strum the four-note chords at the root of the
previous diatonic arpeggios.
(Sound example: Strummed four-note chords)
- I´ll now go back to playing the F major scale, but this time over
a rhythmic foundation in 3/4, still with the F/C drone
underneath.
(Sound example: F major scale as eight-note triplets in 3/4)
- Then the four-note diatonic arpeggios over the “3” beat.
(Sound example: Four-note diatonic arpeggios as eight-note triplets in 3/4)
- Some of the tunes that form the base of this project seem to
revolve around the harmonic minor scale – that is, a minor scale
with a lowered sixth step, and a raised seventh step – and
consequently I´ll proceed to practicing the harmonic minor
scale, first with the 4/4 beat underneath, and the F drone.
(Sound example: F harmonic scale, 4/4)
- Next up is the F harmonic scale, this time over a 3/4 beat, still
with the F/C drone underneath.
(Sound example: F harmonic scale as eight-note triplets in 3/4)
32
4. Learning in C
5. Learning in G
6. Learning in D
7. Learning in A
8. Learning in E
9. Learning in B
10. Learning in F#
11. Learning in C#
12. Learning in G#
13. Learning in D#
14. Learning in A#
7:59
7:08
7:21
7:15
6:48
6:29
6:51
7:10
7:35
7:08
7:45
15. LEARNING AND ARRANGING TUNES –
WORK PROCESS
(0:39)
The next segment of my project will concern itself with building a strong
repertoire of traditional tunes played on the guitar bouzouki alone. My work
process is as follows:
- First I´ll record my secondary supervisor Geir Egil Larsen, or
some other source, playing traditional tunes,
- I´ll then learn the tune with my voice,
- And I´ll then create a suggestion for a bouzouki arrangement.
16. GRENSESLÅTT (“Border tune”), PRESENTATION 0:50
Played on flute by Geir Egil Larsen.
17. GRENSESLÅTT, VOCAL VERSION
0:51
18. GRENSESLÅTT,
GUITAR BOUZOUKI ARRANGEMENT
1:36
I´m experimenting in this arrangement with letting the bass line in the first
section of the tune emphasize the third beat of each measure.
33
34
35
19. SPRINGLEIK ETTER ELLING HOLSTAD,
PRESENTATION
1:43
Played on fiddle by Sturla Eide.
VOCAL VERSION
1:00
I´ll do some octave jumps here and there because of my limited vocal
range.
1:56
Since this was an experiment early in my project, I deviated from my
usual principles and moved the whole tune from its original key of G, and
down to F, for reasons of playability on the guitar bouzouki.
36
37
38
22. HALLING ETTER LARS VOLDØYHAUG,
PRESENTATION 2:39
Played on fiddle by Sturla Eide.
VOCAL VERSION
1:34
2:54
For purposes of playability (again), I´ve moved the tune down a wholestep from its original key of D major to C major.
39
40
41
25. WESTBERG, PRESENTATION
1:45
Here´s a tune in the Røros pols genre (which was composed by Tron Steffen
Westberg), and it doesn´t really have a name, so I´ll refer to it as
“Westberg”. This is played by Sturla Eide on fiddle.
26. WESTBERG, VOCAL VERSION 1:34
27. WESTBERG, GUITAR BOUZOUKI ARRANGEMENT
1:33
This is moved down a full step from the key of G (in the source from Sturla
Eide), down to F on the guitar bouzouki.
42
43
44
28. POLKA DALAKOPA, PRESENTATION 1:58
Polkas are pretty common as dance tunes in the Trøndelag area, and here´s a
polka that Sturla Eide plays on fiddle that he´s learned from the musicians in
the band Dalakopa.
29. POLKA DALAKOPA, VOCAL VERSION
1:54
I´ll do some octave leaps for the “C” part because of my limited voice range.
30. POLKA DALAKOPA,
GUITAR BOUZOUKI ARRANGEMENT 1:58
45
46
47
31. SELF-CRITICAL REFLECTION, POLKA DALAKOPA,
0:52
In the “B” section, or the second section of this tune, I have missed a very
important rhythmical device that Sturla and many other traditional musicians
use to propel dancers forward, that is in called Norwegian “hopp”, or the
“jump”, and it appears like this if I try to imitate it with my voice: (keep
listening…)
48
32. RIL FRA MAUSUNDVÆR, PRESENTATION 1:59
Reel tunes are normally associated with the Celtic musical domain – but we
have them in Norway too, and this tune has been “claimed” by people from
many parts of our country. So the fact that it´s been found in the
Mausundvær island in the archipelago outside Trondheim doesn´t really tell
us anything about its origins, but I know for a fact that it can be found in the
northeastern regions of England as well. I included this tune on my first solo
record “Maus” (which is an abbreviation of “Mausundvær”), but once again,
I din´t “treat” it improvisationally the way I will here. This is Sturla Eide
playing “Ril fra Mausundvær” on fiddle
33. RIL FRA MAUSUNDVÆR, VOCAL VERSION
1:35
It goes without saying, I think, that you need to be a much better singer than
I am to do justice to the very quick pace and the extreme range that this tune
has – so I´ll straight away modulate it from D major (that Sturla plays this
tune in) and down to F major (to accommodate my vocal range), and also I´ll
set the pace down drastically just to pay attention to the pitches of the
melody.
34. RIL FRA MAUSUNDVÆR,
GUITAR BOUZOUKI ARRANGEMENT 1:25
This is moved from Sturla Eide´s key of D down to the key of F for reasons
of playability. (No sheet music, sound only)
35. RIL FRA MAUSUNDVÆR , OBSERVATION 0:47
When Sturla Eide plays this tune, he plays it with even eight notes, like this:
(keep listening…)
49
36. REINLENDER 122, PRESENTATION
0:31
My source material for this tune is only written sheet music, which is an
exception to my rule. I found this sheet music in a songbook (or tunebook)
called “Slåtter fra Innherred” (tunes from Innherred) after the heritage of Ole
Bjørken. So, I´ll jump straight to the vocal version of this tune:
37. REINLENDER 122, VOCAL VERSION 1:24
38. REINLENDER 122,
2:39
50
51
52
39. BRUREMARSJ FRA BREKSTAD, PRESENTATION
0:22
I don´t have a recorded source for this - I lifted it from a tunebook called
“Fosentonar” which was edited by Bjørn Aksdal, so I´ll jump straight to the
vocal version:
40. BRUREMARSJ FRA BREKSTAD, VOCAL VERSION
41. BRUREMARSJ FRA BREKSTAD,
2:02
3:28
This is a tune that I included on my 2003 album “Maus”, but the guitar
bouzouki solo version that you´re hearing here is all new to this project, and
contains other harmonies than I´ve used previously.
53
54
55
42. REINLENDER ETTER HARALD GILLAN,
PRESENTATION 1:04
This is music from the border region towards Sweden (from the village of
Meråker) and it´s played on the Meråker clarinet by Geir Egil Larsen, and
the Meråker clarinet is a reed instrument quite similar to the medieval
shawm.
VOCAL VERSION
1:15
I´ll interpret the seventh interval as a major seventh, whereas the source
version on Meråker clarinet sounds like somewhere in between the major
seventh and a lowered seventh.
1:56
In the source recording from Geir Egil Larsen, I hear a variation between a
lowered sixth and a regular sixth interval, so I´ll use both.
56
57
45. GROPEN, PRESENTATION 1:36
(Or “Storhurven”) This is played on fiddle by Einar Olav Larsen.
46. GROPEN, VOCAL VERSION
1:07
It´s a little bit hard to get a clear understanding of what the first phrase really
is, so I´ve consciously defined it as the phrase that I sing here.
47. GROPEN, GUITAR BOUZOUKI ARRANGEMENT 1:53
On my source recording for this, Einar Olav Larsen played the tune in a
fiddle tuning from bottom to top: A –E – A –E, and to emulate this, I have
decided not to retune my guitar bouzouki, but to put a capo, or clamp, in the
seventh fret, to try to imitate the exact timbre that the fiddle produces.
58
59
48. SPRINGLEIK ETTER OLE BERGE, PRESENTATION
1:36
This is Sturla Eide on fiddle.
49. SPRINGLEIK ETTER OLE BERGE, VOCAL VERSION 0:55
50. SPRINGLEIK ETTER OLE BERGE,
1:34
60
61
62
51. F-DURING FRA INNDAL,
(“F major tune from Inndal”), PRESENTATION
1:41
This is Einar Olav Larsen on fiddle.
52. F-DURING FRA INNDAL, VOCAL VERSION 0:55
53. F-DURING FRA INNDAL,
1:35
63
64
54. ELLEIN, PRESENTATION 2:38
This is Sturla Eide on fiddle and myself on guitar from the album
“Glimmer” from 2003.
55. ELLEIN, VOCAL VERSION 1:18
56. ELLEIN, GUITAR BOUZOUKI ARRANGEMENT 2:24
(Sound only)
57. SPRINGAR ETTER HARALD GILLAN,
PRESENTATION
1:18
This is played on Meråker Clarinet by Geir Egil Larsen, and notice the little
microtonalities that occur here: For example the low fifth, which sounds a
little bit sharp in the “tempered ear”, so to speak. I´m unable to imitate this
tonality on my intrument, but there it is.
VOCAL VERSION
1:12
I have to dispense with a lot of the finger ornaments, or trills, that Geir Egil
Larsen plays, and try to aim for what I think is the core melody.
1:13
65
66
60. POLSKA ETTER LAPP-NILS OG HARALD GILLAN,
PRESENTATION
0:52
This is Geir Egil Larsen playing the Meråker clarinet.
VOCAL VERSION
0:54
0:57
67
68
69
63. SPRINGLEIK ETTER OLAV NILSEN, PRESENTATION 1:44
This is Sturla Eide on fiddle.
64. SPRINGLEIK ETTER OLAV NILSEN,
VOCAL VERSION
1:09
Measures 4 and 8 in the “A” part contain a very low D that I´m not able to
reach with my voice, so I´ll just “breathe” those two low D´s to indicate
them.
65. SPRINGLEIK ETTER OLAV NILSEN,
1:38
Though I tend to stay away from “over-harmonizing” these tunes, towards
the very end of the tune (on the very last note, in fact), the tune ends on a G,
and the melody seems to me to indicate that it should be supported by a pure
G major chord. However, I´m substituting it for a C chord to create some
momentum back to the top of the tune again (that starts with a G major
triad). Notice also that for the “B” part I am experimenting with an
ascending bass line that anticipates the melody – and this may disturb the
dance-oriented nature of this music – but I thought it was a fun element to
introduce.
70
71
72
66. HALLING ETTER HILMAR ALEXANDERSEN,
PRESENTATION 1:38
This is Geir Egil Larsen on sap flute, or seljefløyte.
VOCAL VERSION
1:28
In the sap flute presentation by Geir Egil Larsen, he stopped to repeat a few
phrases for purposes of practice, and later performances by him have led me
to believe that the following is the form he usually adheres to.
1:29
I´m experimenting with harmonizations a little bit outside conventional
functional harmony here, such as the lowered sixth bass note in the “B” part.
73
74
69. ØRSALPOLS, PRESENTATION
3:21
This is Geir Egil Larsen on sap flute, or seljefløyte, playing a tune that´s
actually outside of the area that I mostly concentrate on, because this is
taken from Hallvar Ørsal´s repertoire, and he was a feddler based in the
Normøre region. He also performed and lived in the United States.
70. ØRSALPOLS, VOCAL VERSION 0:57
I´ll try to stick to the tonalities based on the sap flute version played by Geir
Egil Larsen.
71. ØRSALPOLS, GUITAR BOUZOUKI ARRANGEMENT 1:46
I´m still trying to let the sap flute tonality govern my harmonizations here,
and that includes for example the raised fourth in the “B” section of the tune.
75
76
77
72. POLSDANS ETTER HILMAR ALEXANDERSEN,
PRESENTATION
1:31
This is Geir Egil Larsen on recorder flute.
VOCAL VERSION
1:20
Because of the extreme range of this tune, I´ll set the pace down to try to
reach all the pitches as correctly as possible with my voice.
1:18
I´m trying to use the harmonizations to try to break away from the repetitive
nature of this melody – so on the “same” melody line, I´ll use “chord set
number one”, “chord set number two”, “chord set number two”, and “chord
set number one”. This concerns the “A” part of the tune.
78
79
80
75. GROPEN (SAP FLUTE VERSION): PRESENTATION 1:28
This is Geir Egil Larsen on sap flute, or seljefløyte.
76. GROPEN (SAP FLUTE VERSION): VOCAL VERSION 0:54
77. GROPEN (SAP FLUTE VERSION): GUITAR BOUZOUKI
ARRANGEMENT
1:40
81
82
83
PHRASE TREATMENTS
78. MELODIC MOTIFS - A QUICK PERSPECTIVE
(5:52)
(Sound example: “Ornithology”, played on saxophone by Charlie Parker,
with various other musicians)
My project does not belong in the free improvisation field. Instead, as the
listener will hopefully perceive, I try to consciously establish a vocabulary
of melodic and rhythmic phrases and profiles from the traditional music of
Trøndelag to create a vocabulary that will hopefully become a resource pool
I can reach into for spontaneous ideas that still express a connection with my
source material.
Why is this my chosen method?
Early in my teens I took an interest in jazz music. Though my musical
abilities and interests have proven to lie elsewhere, my fascination and
appreciation for african-american improvised music prevails. Though my
attention span was as short as any fourteen-year-old´s, I remember being
fascinated by reading about how meticulous jazz saxophone genius Charlie
Parker was throughout his career in building a catalogue of phrases that he
experimented with: Any phrase had to work in all twelve keys, on different
locations tonally, and sometimes with variations in rhythmic placement.
Eyewitness acounts tell stories of how Parker and various fellow musicians
would spend the daytime hours practicing arpeggiated chords, eight-note
runs over expanded dominant chords, and many other features in the music
they were building, and presenting it to the world on the bandstands in New
York during the bebop era of the forties and early fifties.
(Sound example: “Billie´s Bounce”, played on saxophone by Charlie Parker,
with various other musicians)
Many jazz scholars, including my main supervisor, maintain that Parker´s
main inspiration for this working routine was his predecessor in jazz history,
swing saxophonist Lester Young. The shift in thinking about jazz harmony
can perhaps be exemplified by the difference between Coleman Hawkins´
and Lester Young´s versions of the jazz standard “Body and Soul”:
84
Hawkins chooses to rely on arpeggiated chords as his main building block,
whereas Young transports a simple melodic idea from tonal level to tonal
level over the chord changes. A simple way of putting this may be that
Hawkins interprets harmony vertically, Young interprets it horizontally.
(Sound example: Coleman Hawkins´ and Lester Young´s versions of “Body
and Soul”)
Diving very quickly into Charlie Parker´s recorded work, slightly different
versions of the same phrase can be heard in “Billies Bounce” (0:52),
“Ornithology”(1:00), and in “Parker´s Mood” (0:43).
As I mention elsewhere, jazz isn´t the only improvised music form in the
world to rely on phrase vocabularies like this, as many excerpts from Indian
or Arabic music would show, for example. But Charlie Parker´s method was
the first one I came across, and it´s still with me.
79. PHRASE TREATMENTS: PROCESS EXPLANATION
(2:05)
I´ll now start extracting little phrases from the traditional tunes that I have
learnt and arranged for the guitar bouzouki. I have two reasons for choosing
the phrases that I do:
- My first reason is: If a phrase seems to appear over several
tunes, I´ll view it as a marker of regional style, and that makes it
a very relevant phrase in my view.
- My other reason for choosing a particular phrase is quite simply
taste – I just like some of the phrases better than others.
In this part of my project I will ll dispense with rhythm altogether. This
means that I will not have any rhythmic accompaniment, nor will I feel any
rhythmic “obligations” when I investigate these phrases on my instrument.
The purpose of this part of my research is quite simply to pick out a phrase,
try to be conscious about which scale the phrase belongs to in the original of
the tune, and then investigate what the phrase will sound like from all the
other steps of the scale that the tune seems to be “in” from the outset. For
example, the first phrase that I´ve chosen, from “Grenseslått”, seem to me to
belong well within the mode of D harmonic minor. Therefore, I´ll
investigate what it sounds like from every step of the harmonic minor scale
in all twelve keys, one key at the time. You´ll also hear that I use a drone
85
over or under the melodic phrase itself from time to time, such as in this first
phrase. I do this because droning “next to” a melodic phrase is a very
common feature of traditional fiddle music, not only in Norway, but in a lot
of other areas as well – and my experiment with this first phrase, and in
some other cases as well, goes to investigate whether or not the drone can be
“outside” the functional harmonic system itself.
80. PHRASE #1, PRESENTATION
(0:18)
Here´s the first phrase I´ve chosen to extract. This is the very first measure
of the tune “Grenseslått”.
81. Phrase #1, Dm
82. Phrase #1, Gm
83. Phrase #1, Cm
84. Phrase #1, Fm
85. Phrase #1, Bbm
86. Phrase #1, Ebm
87. Phrase #1, Abm
88. Phrase #1, Dbm
89. Phrase #1, Gbm
90. Phrase #1, Bm
91. Phrase #1, Em
92. Phrase #1, Am
0:57
0:59
0:49
1:01
1:07
0:55
1:00
1:06
1:00
1:05
0:53
0:56
93. SELF-CRITICAL REFLECTION, PHRASE #1 (0:33)
I seem to have lost track of the rhythmic profile in this phrase because the
original as played by Geir Egil Larsen sounds like this (keep listening…..)
(0:18)
Taken from “Springleik etter Elling Holstad”, as played on fiddle by Sturla
Eide.
95.
96.
97.
98.
99.
Phrase #2, G
Phrase #2, C
Phrase #2, F
Phrase #2, Bb
Phrase #2, Eb
0:44
1:01
0:58
0:56
0:55
86
100.
101.
102.
103.
104.
105.
106.
Phrase #2, Ab
Phrase #2, Db
Phrase #2, Gb
Phrase #2, B
Phrase #2, E
Phrase #2, A
Phrase #2, D
0:56
0:43
0:52
0:55
0:48
0:57
0:49
107. SELF-CRITICAL REFLECTION, PHRASE #2
(0:42)
I´m editing this stuff quite a while after having recorded it, and I can now
hear that I have deviated from the original phrase that goes (keep
listening…)
(0:35)
Taken from “Halling etter Lars Voldøyhaug”, played on fiddle by Sturla
Eide.
109. Phrase #3, D
110. Phrase #3, G
111. Phrase #3, C
112. Phrase #3, F
113. Phrase #3, Bb
114. Phrase #3, Eb
115. Phrase #3, Ab
116. Phrase #3, Db
117. Phrase #3, Gb
118. Phrase #3, B
119. Phrase #3, E
120. Phrase #3, A
0:52
0:49
0:51
0:50
0:53
0:49
0:46
0:45
0:45
0:48
1:09
0:44
121. SELF-CRITICAL REFLECTION, PHRASE #3
(0:45)
Though I´ve stated earlier that this phase of the project is primarily designed
to get a good grasp of melodic contours of the phrases that I´ve chosen, it
still bugs me that I´ve missed out completely on the very important rhythmic
quality of the Norwegian halling rhythm. If you go back and listen to
Sturla´s bowstrokes, you´ll hear him emphasizing the offbeats very clearly
(keep listening…)
87
(2:25)
This is a phrase that sit very firmly within the Røros pols tradition and it´s
lifted from the tune “Westberg” by Tron-Steffen Westberg, as played by
Sturla Eide on fiddle. This very phrase underlines a marker feature of the
Røros pols, which is kind of “muting out” the “one” beat of certain
measures. If I sing the phrase before the phrase that I´ve lifted and the phrase
that I´ve lifted together, this is what it´ll sound like: (keep listening…)
123. Phrase #4, A
124. Phrase #4, D
125. Phrase #4, G
126. Phrase #4, C
127. Phrase #4, F
128. Phrase #4, Bb
129. Phrase #4, Eb
130. Phrase #4, Ab
131. Phrase #4, Db
132. Phrase #4, Gb
133. Phrase #4, B
134. Phrase #4, E
0:25
0:27
0:25
0:29
0:27
0:24
0:27
0:29
0:23
0:26
0:30
0:27
(0:16)
From “Dalakopa”, played on hardanger fiddle by Sturla Eide.
136. Phrase #5, F
137. Phrase #5, Bb
138. Phrase #5, Eb
139. Phrase #5, Ab
140. Phrase #5, Db
141. Phrase #5, Gb
142. Phrase #5, B
143. Phrase #5, E
144. Phrase #5, A
145. Phrase #5, G
146. Phrase #5, C
0:44
0:49
0:48
0:47
0:43
0:47
0:46
0:49
0:50
0:49
0:48
88
(0:34)
This is from “Ril fra Mausundvær”, played on fiddle by Sturla Eide. For
technical reasons, I´ve omitted some notes from the “bottom layer” of this
phrase. Sturla plays (keep listening…)
148. Phrase #6, D
149. Phrase #6, G
150. Phrase #6, C
151. Phrase #6, F
152. Phrase #6, Bb
153. Phrase #6, Eb
154. Phrase #6, Ab
155. Phrase #6, Db
156. Phrase #6, Gb
157. Phrase #6, B
158. Phrase #6, E
159. Phrase #6, A
0:52
1:04
1:05
1:09
1:10
1:07
1:09
1:09
1:06
1:06
0:57
1:04
(0:25)
This is taken from “Reinlender 122”, and I don´t have a recorded source for
this, only sheet music, so my own extraction on the guitar bouzouki of the
phrase will be the source.
161. Phrase#7, G
162. Phrase #7, C
163. Phrase #7, F
164. Phrase #7, Bb
165. Phrase #7, Eb
166. Phrase #7, Ab
167. Phrase #7, Db
168. Phrase #7, Gb
169. Phrase #7, B
170. Phrase #7, E
171. Phrase #7, A
172. Phrase #7, D
1:00
1:04
1:08
1:05
1:03
0:59
0:58
0:57
0:56
0:56
0:55
0:55
89
(0:30)
This phrase is taken from the tune “Bruremarsj fra Brekstad”, or “Nuptial
march from Brekstad”, and I had only written material for this, no recorded
source, so here´s what the phrase will sound like in my interpretation on the
guitar bouzouki.
174. Phrase #8, F
175. Phrase #8, Bb
176. Phrase #8, Eb
177. Phrase #8, Ab
178. Phrase #8, Db
179. Phrase #8, Gb
180. Phrase # 8, B
181. Phrase #8, E
182. Phrase #8, A
183. Phrase #8, D
184. Phrase #8, G
185. Phrase #8, C
2:02
2:01
1:51
1:45
1:29
1:22
1:26
1:26
1:18
1:27
1:28
1:33
(0:49)
This is taken from “Reinlender etter Harald Gilland”, and the original source
is Geir Egil Larsen on Meråker clarinet.
187. Phrase #9, C
188. Phrase #9, F
189. Phrase #9, Bb
190. Phrase #9, Eb
191. Phrase #9, Ab
192. Phrase #9, Db
193. Phrase #9, Gb
194. Phrase #9, B
195. Phrase #9, E
196. Phrase #9, A
197. Phrase #9, D
198. Phrase #9, G
2:13
1:49
1:47
1:26
1:30
1:34
1:35
1:48
1:21
1:31
1:29
1:57
90
(0:22)
This is taken from the tune “Gropen”, played on fiddle by Einar Olav
Larsen.
200. Phrase #10, G
201. Phrase #10, C
202. Phrase #10, F
203. Phrase #10, Bb
204. Phrase #10, Eb
205. Phrase #10, Ab
206. Phrase #10, Db
207. Phrase #10, Gb
208. Phrase #10, B
209. Phrase #10, E
210. Phrase #10, A
211. Phrase #10, D
1:33
1:31
1:39
1:46
1:33
1:24
1:26
1:19
1:31
1:26
1:22
1:28
(0:42)
The source for this is Sturla Eide playing “Springleik etter Ole Berge” on
fiddle.
213. Phrase #11, D
214. Phrase #11, G
215. Phrase #11, C
216. Phrase #11, F
217. Phrase #11, Bb
218. Phrase #11, Eb
219. Phrase #11, Ab
220. Phrase #11, Db
221. Phrase #11, Gb
222.. Phrase #11, B
223 Phrase #11, E
224. Phrase #11, A
1:44
1:36
1:46
1:39
1:44
1:46
1:40
1:35
1:34
1:29
1:25
1:29
91
(0:27)
This is from “F-during fra Inndal”, played on fiddle by Einar Olav Larsen.
226. SELF-CRITICAL OBSERVATION, PHRASE #12
(0:47)
I seem to have missed the ornament on the last note of the phrase. If I try to
imitate it with my voice, the original goes like this: (keep listening…)
227. Phrase #12, F
228. Phrase #12, Bb
229. Phrase #12, Eb
230. Phrase #12, Ab
231. Phrase #12, Db
232. Phrase #12, Gb
233. Phrase #12, B
234. Phrase #12, E
235. Phrase #12, A
236. Phrase #12, D
237. Phrase #12, G
238. Phrase #12, C
2:37
2:29
2:10
1:54
2:04
1:53
2:01
1:58
1:47
1:54
2:05
2:18
239. Phrase #13, PRESENTATION (0:18)
This is taken from “Ellein”, played on fiddle by Sturla Eide.
240. PHRASE #13, REFLECTION (0:32)
I´m having a hard time hearing whether Sturla Eide plays a regular sixth
interval or a flattened sixth interval in the first phrase. That is, whether he
plays: (keep listening…)
241. Phrase #13, Gm
242. Phrase #13, Cm
243. Phrase #13, Fm
244. Phrase #13, Bbm
245. Phrase #13, Ebm
246. Phrase #13, Abm
247. Phrase #13, Dbm
248. Phrase #13, Gbm
1:09
1:16
1:10
1:12
1:12
1:04
1:02
0:59
92
249. Phrase #13, Bm
250. Phrase #13, Em
251. Phrase #13, Am
252. Phrase #13, Dm
0:43
1:07
1:04
1:15
(0:35)
This is taken from “Springar etter Harald Gilland”, played on Meråker
clarinet by Geir Egil Larsen.
254. Phrase #14, Eb
255. Phrase #14, Ab
256. Phrase #14, Db
257. Phrase #14, Gb
258. Phrase #14, B
259. Phrase #14, E
260. Phrase #14, A
261. Phrase #14, D
262. Phrase #14, G
263. Phrase #14, C
264. Phrase #14, F
265. Phrase #14, Bb
1:52
3:58
2:52
2:48
3:00
3:10
2:59
2:52
2:39
3:14
3:19
3:18
266. IMITATING FIDDLE ORNAMENTS (7:09)
(Sound example: “Gamal Vals etter Hallvar Ørsal”, played on fiddle by
Hilmar Alexandersen)
Most of my project is based on the hypothesis that Norwegian and Swedish
traditional music has definite melodic phrases as markers of style. However,
playing techniques also play an important role in defining a regional style.
Fiddle ornaments in Norwegian music is an extensive field of study, and
Sven Nyhus´ considerable efforts of documentation are worth mentioning,
though I´ll use my own approach here.
(Sound example: “Gamal Vals etter Hallvar Ørsal”, triplet over fifth-step
drone)
As my work has progressed, I seem to notice that fiddle-like ornaments have
crept into my improvisations without a conscious practice effort. In
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hindsight, I offer this soundbite to give but a few brief examples of the
graceful trills, double-stop trills, diminutions and anticipations in Hilmar
Alexandersen´s solo fiddle recordings.
In “Gamal Vals etter Hallvar Ørsal”, Alexandersen decorates the very first
beat with a triplet over a fifth-step drone. To my perception, the third step is
slightly lowered, but since there is only a fifth-step drone to accompany it,
the ear could be playing tricks on me. The ornament is the point here.
drone, repeated)
I´ll now try to play along with it:
drone, with guitar bouzouki imitation, repeated)
And alone:
drone, guitar bouzouki imitation alone, repeated)
On the third beat of “Polsdans etter Olaf Næss”, we hear four sixteenth-notes
replacing a quarter-note.
(Sound example: “Polsdans etter Olaf Næss”, four sixteenth-notes replacing
a quarter note, repeated).
I´ll try to join in:
(Sound example: “Polsdans etter Olaf Næss”, four sixteenth-notes replacing
a quarter note, with guitar bouzouki imitation, repeated, followed by guitar
bouzouki imitation alone).
“Reinlender etter Odin Oksås” sees a single anticipatory grace note at the
beginning of the second measure, a two-sixteenth-note diminution at the
middle of the same measure, and a four-sixteenth-note diminution at the
beginning of the third measure.
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(Sound example: “Reinlender etter Odin Oksås”, single anticipatory single
note, two sixteenth-note diminution, and four sixteenth-note diminution,
repeated)
And I´ll try to join:
(Sound example: “Reinlender etter Odin Oksås”, single anticipatory single
note, two sixteenth-note diminution, and four sixteenth-note diminution,
with guitar bouzouki imitation, repeated, followed by guitar bouzouki
imitation alone, repeated)
As you can hear, there are problems of relative tuning problems here, but I´ll
ask for your patience for the last example.
“Polsdans etter Fredrik Løvsjøli”, represented elsewhere as “Grenseslått” or
“Border Tune”, contains an embellishment of two anticipatory grace notes
at the beginning of the second measure, just before the quadruplet, which to
my ears creates a “whirling” quality.
(Sound example: “Polsdans etter Fredrik Løvsjøli”, two anticipatory grace
notes, repeated)
I´ll try to join:
(Sound example: “Polsdans etter Fredrik Løvsjøli”, two anticipatory grace
notes, with guitar bouzouki imitation, repeated, followed by guitar bouzouki
imitation, repeated)
As an experiment, I´ll now cross-fade two improvisations. The first is an
unprepared, spur-of the moment attempt at using an electric guitar to
improvise over a pols rhythm, with instinctive choices of embellishment
from my jazz and blues training, and the other is performed on the guitar
bouzouki. String bends, vibratos and microtonalities commonly referred to
as “blue” notes are predominant in the electric segment, whereas it´s my
hope that the process of studying melodic profiles and ornaments on the
guitar bouzouki will have paid off and that my playing sounds more
Norwegian in the second segment – I´ll let the listener decide.
(Sound example: Two improvisations over the same pols rhythm)
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267. IMITATING WIND INSTRUMENT ORNAMENTS (3:51)
All of these examples are played by Geir Egil Larsen on a variety of wind
instruments.
First: “Polska ettter Lapp-Nils og Harrald Gillan”, played on Meråker
clarinet.
(Sound example: “Polska etter Lapp-Nils og Harald Gillan”)
The phrase that I´ve isolated seems to contain an anticipatory quadruplet.
(Sound example: “Polska etter Lapp-Nils og Harald Gillan”, anticipatory
quadruplet, repeated)
I´ll try to join:
quadruplet, with guitar bouzouki, repeated)
And me alone:
quadruplet, guitar bouzouki alone, repeated)
The next phrase is from the “B” section of “Polsdans etter Hilmar
Alexandersen”, played on flute.
(Sound example: “B” section of “Polsdans etter Hilmar Alexandersen”,
played on flute)
The phrase I´m interested in seems to have an anticipatory triplet:
(Sound example: “Polsdans etter Hilmar Alexandersen”, played on flute,
anticipatory triplet, repeated)
I´ll try to join:
(Sound example: “Polsdans etter Hilmar Alexandersen”, played on flute,
anticipatory triplet, with guitar bouzouki, repeated)
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And me alone:
(Sound example: “Polsdans etter Hilmar Alexandersen” anticipatory triplet,
guitar bouzouki alone, repeated)
The next phrase is played on sap flute, or seljefløyte. This is “Ørsalpols”:
(Sound example: “Ørsalpols”, played on sap flute)
My ear seems to detect two anticipatory sixteenth notes:
(Sound example: “Ørsalpols”, played on sap flute, two anticipatory sixteenth
notes, repeated)
I´ll try to join:
(Sound example: “Ørsalpols”, played on sap flute, with guitar bouzouki, two
anticipatory sixteenth notes, repeated)
And me alone:
(Sound example: “Ørsalpols”, two anticipatory sixteenth notes, guitar
bouzouki alone, repeated)
Back to the Meråker clarinet. This is “Reinlender etter Harald Gillan”:
(Sound example: “Reinlender etter Harald Gillan”, played on Meråker
clarinet)
I think I´m hearing one eighth note turned into a diminution of four thirtsecond notes:
clarinet, one eighth note turned into a diminution of four thirty-second notes,
repeated)
I´ll try to join:
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clarinet, with guitar bouzouki, one eighth note turned into a diminution of
four thirty-second notes, repeated)
And me alone:
(Sound example: “Reinlender etter Harald Gillan”, guitar bouzouki alone,
one eighth note turned into a diminution of four thirty-second notes,
repeated)
Moving on to “Springar etter Harald Gillan”, still on Meråker clarinet:
(Sound example: “Springar etter Harald Gillan”, played on Meråker
clarinet)
If you think about this in 9/8 time, I think I´m hearing first two quarter notes
as sixteenth-note quadruplet diminutions, and then a triplet diminution.
(Sound example: “Springar etter Harald Gillan”, played on Meråker clarinet,
two quarter notes as sixteenth-note quadruplet diminutions, followed by
triplet diminution, repeated)
I´ll try to join:
(Sound example: “Springar etter Harald Gillan”, played on Meråker clarinet,
with guitar bouzouki, two quarter notes as sixteenth-note quadruplet
diminutions, followed by triplet diminution, repeated)
And me alone:
(Sound example: “Springar etter Harald Gillan”, guitar bouzouki alone, two
quarter notes as sixteenth-note quadruplet diminutions, followed by triplet
diminution, repeated)
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268. NORWEGIAN DRUMMING, REVISITED (3:04)
(Sound example: “Jess”, played in concert by Andreas Aase Liga)
In the first section about the general features of Norwegian traditional music
I mentioned Carl Haakon Waadeland´s efforts to revitalize Norwegian drum
traditions. Based on the collections and recordings of Johannes Sundvor,
Carl Haakon has shared his ideas with me in various ensembles over the past
three years.
In the tune “Jess”, written at the start of my project, Carl Haakon and I
collaborated in using “Bryllupsslått fra Hålandsdalen”, from his repertoire:
(Sound example: “Bryllupsslått fra Hålandsdalen”, played on snare drum by
Carl Haakon Waadeland)
, but we changed the ground pulse around a little bit:
(Sound example: “Bryllupsslått fra Hålandsdalen, played on snare drum by
Carl Haakon Waadeland, new ground pulse, in concert with Andreas Aase
Liga)
I experimented with creating a new melodic line around this drum tune, and
the result of this improvisational process gave us a new unison section for
the tune. Improvising on top of Norwegian drum tunes has hopefully added a
rhythmic understanding to my playing, though the pitch choices here are not
that Norwegian-sounding:
(Sound example: “Bryllupsslått fra Hålandsdalen, played on snare drum by
Carl Haakon Waadeland, new ground pulse, with new melody line on top, in
concert with Andreas Aase Liga)
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269. INTERLUDE (2:18)
- Live recording, May 2008
This is Carl Haakon Waadeland on shakers and me on guitar bouzouki
experimenting in front of a jazz club audience in Levanger with interjecting
an improvised section into an old waltz after Hilmar Alexandersen.
(Sound example: “Gamal Vals frå Inherad”, shakers / guitar bouzouki duo
improvisation, live)
This was recorded half-way through my project, and though it´s passable
music, I still think there´s a lot of work to be done.
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MP 3 CD # 2
101
RHYTHMIC EXPANSIONS
1. COMPOSITE PHRASE #1, PRESENTATION (1:26)
After my gig with my band at Levanger Jazz Club in May 2008, I decided
that I need to have a greater rhythmic palette to choose from in my
improvisations, and this is an attempt to develop a few devices. My first
source for material is Sturla Eide, playing a snippet of “Springleik etter
Elling Holstad” on fiddle:
(Sound example: Sturla Eide playing “Springleik etter Elling Holstad” on
fiddle)
For purposes of variation, I´ll start by extracting a little snippet towards the
very end of what you just heard, and then I´ll take out the first few notes of
the tune. Reshuffling the sequence of these two little snippets yields a phrase
that, loosely interpreted, comes out sounding like this:
(Sound example: Composite Phrase # 1, repeated)
- And I´ll now proceed to experiment with this phrase, practicing it in all
twelve keys, from every step of the major scale, and every step of the
harmonic minor scale, over beats of 4/4 and 3/4.
2. UNDERSTANDING COMPOSITE PHRASE #1
(2:20)
Before I start practicing this phrase around the circle of fifths, I´ll interject a
little remark on the rhythmic understanding I´m trying to obtain here.
If this phrase is played as sixteenth-notes over a 4/4 beat, and I start one the
“one”, the phrase will last sixteen sixteenth notes. That is, one full measure,
and it brings me around four beats, like this:
(Sound example: Composite phrase #1 in 4/4)
In 3/4, or pols time, the story is a little different, though. It seems that I´ve
been practicing this phrase omitting the upbeat, after having played it the
very first time, and if this is played as triplets over a 3/4 beat, the phrase
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constitutes fifteen triplet notes (eight-note triplets). That means this phrase
will land on the “one” in measures 1, 6, 11, 16 and 21.
(Sound example: Composite phrase #1 over 3/4 beat)
3. Composite phrase #1, F
4. Composite phrase #1, C
5. Composite phrase #1, G
6. Composite phrase #1, D
7. Composite phrase #1, A
8. Composite phrase #1, E
9. Composite phrase #1, B
10. Composite phrase #1, F#
11. Composite phrase #1, C#
12. Composite phrase #1, G#
13. Composite phrase #1, D#
14. Composite phrase #1, A#
4:44
4:53
5:09
5:08
4:46
4:36
4:58
4:51
4:49
4:41
5:08
4:54
15. FIVE FIGURE IDEA, PRESENTATION
(5:37)
(Sound example. “All about you” – Lennie Tristano)
This is a jazz tune that follows the time-honoured practice of writing a new
melody line over the chord changes of an existing tune, in this case the
standard tune “How about you”. This Lennie Tristano line, here performed
by saxophone player Warne Marsh and Norwegian jazz musician friends,
contains an idea that I will try to employ in my reinterpretation of phrases
from Norwegian traditional music. The idea is simply to group eight notes in
groups of five, and here once again is the part of the melody in question:
(Sound example: Eight notes in groups of five, “All about you”)
The musicians here start the “five grouping” of the melody on the “one
and”, and I´ll play it for you again trying to count of top of it.
(Sound example: Five phrase from “All about you”, with counting”)
And here is my supervisor John Pål Inderberg trying to teach me how to
internalize this in a vocal/body-percussion session we did.
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(Sound example: Five phrase from “All about you”, vocal/body-percussion
session with John Pål Inderberg)
What Tristano does in his composition is to start this idea on the second beat
of the measure, and here is John Pål Inderberg trying to teach me this, car
noises and all:
(Sound example: Five phrase from “All about you”, from second beat,
vocal/body-percussion session with John Pål Inderberg)
This is hard stuff for me to internalize, and I´m guilty of rushing the tempo
as we´re studying this. However, thirty minutes later, it´s getting slightly
easier to hear this, and I´m beginning to get an idea of the new pulse that´s
generated by accentuating the first eight-notes in the “five” groups.
vocal/body-percussion session with John Pål Inderberg, getting there slowly)
The majority of the tunes that I use as source material for my project are pols
tunes that move in three time, so it´s relevant to investigate how this idea of
grouping eighth notes in five works over a rhythm of three:
vocal/body-percussion session with John Pål Inderberg, over beat in three)
16. FIVE PHRASE: PRESENTATION (0:28)
These are the first measures of “Springleik etter Elling Holstad” played on
fiddle by Sturla Eide.
(Sound example: The first measures of “Springleik etter Elling Holstad”
played on fiddle by Sturla Eide)
, and I´ll extract the following little five-not figure for rhythmic expansion:
(Sound example: Five-note extraction of “Springleik etter Elling Holstad”,
repeated)
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17. UNDERSTANDING THE FIVE PHRASE (1:40 )
If this phrase is played as sixteenth notes over a 4/4 beat, it will land on the
“one” again every 11 measures.
(Sound example: Five phrase over 4/4 beat, repeated, with counting)
If this phrase is played as eighth-note triplets over a 3/4 or pols time, it will
hit on the “one” in measures 1, 6, 11, and 16. It will modulate rhythmically
from there, too, but up to 16 measures is probably as far as I´ll need to
stretch it.
(Sound example: Five phrase over 3/4 beat, repeated, with counting)
18. PRACTICE PROCESS: EXPLANATION
0:28
Now that I´ve decided that this phrase is going to be useful to me, I proceed
to practice it in all twelve keys. First up is F, and I´ll play it in F major and F
harmonic minor over 3/4. Then I proceed to play it in F major and F
harmonic minor in 4/4, and so it goes, around the cycle of fifths in all twelve
keys.
19. Five phrase F, 3/4
20. Five phrase F, 4/4
21. Five phrase C, 3/4
22. Five phrase C, 4/4
23. Five phrase G, 3/4
24. Five phrase G, 4/4
25. Five phrase D, 3/4
26. Five phrase D, 4/4
27. Five phrase A, 3/4
28. Five phrase A, 4/4
29. Five phrase E, 3/4
30. Five phrase E, 4/4
31. Five phrase B, 3/4
32. Five phrase B, 4/4
33. Five phrase F#, 3/4
34. Five phrase F#, 4/4
35. Five phrase C#, 3/4
36. Five phrase C#, 4/4
1:10
1:00
1:15
0:59
1:14
0:59
1:01
0:53
1:10
0:59
1:01
0:58
1:01
0:55
1:23
0:56
0:59
0:55
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37. Five phrase G#, 3/4
38. Five phrase G#, 4/4
39. Five phrase D#, 3/4
40. Five phrase D#, 4/4
41. Five phrase A#, 3/4
42. Five phrase A#, 4/4
0:58
0:56
1:08
0:59
1:00
0:52
43. FIVE PHRASE #2, PRESENTATION
(0:34)
This is a section from “Halling etter Lars Voldøyhaug”, played on hardanger
fiddle, or hardingfele, by Sturla Eide. When I´ve extracted the five
sixteenth-notes I´m interested in, this is what it´ll sound like.
(Sound example: “Halling etter Lars Voldøyhaug”, chopped into groups of
five, played on hardanger fiddle by Sturla Eide)
44. Five phrase #2, F, 4/4
45. Five phrase #2, F, 3/4
46. Five phrase #2, C, 4/4
47. Five phrase #2, C, 3/4
48. Five phrase #2, G, 4/4
49. Five phrase #2, G, 3/4
50. Five phrase #2, D, 4/4
51. Five phrase #2, D, 3/4
52. Five phrase #2, A, 4/4
53. Five phrase #2, A, 3/4
54. Five phrase #2, E, 4/4
55. Five phrase #2, E, 3/4
56. Five phrase #2, B, 4/4
57. Five phrase #2, B, 3/4
58. Five phrase #2, F#, 4/4
59. Five phrase #2, F#, 3/4
60. Five phrase #2, C#, 4/4
61. Five phrase #2, C#, 3/4
62. Five phrase #2, G#, 4/4
63. Five phrase #2, G#, 3/4
64. Five phrase #2, D#, 4/4
65. Five phrase #2, D#, 3/4
66. Five phrase #2, A#, 4/4
67. Five phrase #2, A#, 3/4
1:03
1:12
0:55
1:08
0:55
1:06
0:53
1:01
0:53
1:00
0:56
1:06
0:53
1:09
0:54
1:01
0:53
0:57
0:55
1:10
0:56
1:07
0:56
1:11
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68. FIVE PHRASE #3, PRESENTATION
(0:30)
I´ve taken five sixteenth notes from the very last section of “Halling etter
Hilmar Alexandersen” as played by Geir Egil Larsen on sap flute, and once
I´ve done the “chopping up”, this is what it´ll sound like:
(Sound example: “Halling etter Hilmar Alexandersen”, chopped into group
of five, played on sap flute by Geir Egil Larsen)
69. UNDERSTANDING FIVE PHRASE #3
(1:52)
Although I´ll demonstrate this phrase by playing it in eight notes rather than
sixteenth notes (because of some technical limitations I´m still experiencing
on my instrument), the same pattern emerges: This phrase lands back on the
“one” every five measures. That is, in measures 1, 6, 11, 16, and so forth.
(Sound example: Five phrase #3 in eight notes, with counting, in 4/4)
And if the same phrase is played as eight-note triplets in 3/4, or pols time, it
will recapture itself on the “one” every three measures. Measure 1, 4, 7, 10,
an onwards.
(Sound example: Five phrase #3 in eight notes, with counting, in 3/4)
70. Five phrase #3, F
71. Five phrase #3, C
72. Five phrase #3, G
73. Five phrase #3, D
74. Five phrase #3, A
75. Five phrase #3, E
76. Five phrase #3, B
77. Five phrase #3, F#
78. Five phrase #3, C#
79. Five phrase #3, G#
80. Five phrase #3, D#
81. Five phrase #3, A#
3:05
3:06
3:08
3:24
3:05
3:14
3:13
3:20
3:05
2:22
3:19
3:13
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82. SEVEN FIGURE IDEA: PRESENTATION IN D
(5:38)
(Sound example: “Turkish Mambo”, played on piano by Lennie Tristano)
This is a multi-track recording, where Tristano juxtaposes several rhythmic
layers on top of each other, starting out with a figure in seven, proceeding
with a figure in three, and then introducing a figure in five, to create a
restless and shifting vamp to improvise on top of. Let´s listen to it again and
I´ll try to point out the different rhythmic layers:
(Sound example: “Turkish Mambo”, played on piano by Lennie Tristano,
with counting)
And this is my supervisor John Pål Inderberg, trying to teach me how to
internalize this with body-and-vocal percussion. We try to juxtapose the
layers of three and seven against each other.
(Sound example: Body-and-vocal percussion session, layers of three and
seven)
It´s fun, and it´s excruciatingly difficult to understand this, at least for me.
And for those of you speaking Norwegian, you´ll understand that John Pål
even took the blame for rushing the tempo in this practice session – which
was kind, but not true.
(Sound example: Beginning of “Halling etter Hilmar Alexandersen”, played
on sap flute by Geir Egil Larsen)
You´ve heard this tune elsewhere in my project. This is Geir Egil Larsen
playing “Halling etter Hilmar Alexandersen” on sap flute (seljefløyte). I´ll
use the first measure to create a new rhythmic figure in a group of seven.
(Sound example: Beginning of “Halling etter Hilmar Alexandersen”, played
on sap flute by Geir Egil Larsen, with counting)
I´m taking the liberty of changing the last note of this phrase to propel it
forward better, so instead of playing:
(Sound example: Change of last note in seven phrase)
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83. UNDERSTANDING THE SEVEN PHRASE
(3:08)
The first note of each “seven” group will generate a new pulse, like this:
(Sound example: Resultant pulse in seven over 4/4 beat)
In its original shape, this phrase is played as sixteenth notes over a 4/4
halling beat, starting on the “one”. If I play it like this, it will start on the
“one” again every seven measures, in measure 1, 8, 15, 22 and onwards,
like this:
(Sound example: Seven phrase landing on the “one” again, over 4/4 beat,
with counting)
If the same phrase is interpreted as eight-note triplets over a 9/8 pols groove,
a new pulse will be generated that sounds like this:
(Sound example: Resultant pulse in seven over 9/8 beat)
And if you start this triplet phrase on the “one”, as I tend to do here, the
phrase will land on the “one” again in measures 1, 4, 7, 10, and every three
measures onwards, like this:
(Sound example: Seven phrase landing on the “one” again, over 3/4 beat,
with counting)
84. Seven phrase, F
85. Seven phrase, C
86. Seven phrase, G
87. Seven phrase, D
88. Seven phrase, A
89. Seven phrase, E
90. Seven phrase, B
91. Seven phrase, F#
92. Seven phrase, C#
93. Seven phrase, G#
94. Seven phrase, D#
95. Seven phrase, A#
3:23
3:13
2:51
3:13
2:54
2:42
2:36
2:45
2:43
2:39
2:40
2:39
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MELODIC EXPANSIONS
96. BITONAL PHRASES: PRESENTATION (4:52)
(Sound example: David Liebman, saxophone, and Richard Beirach, piano,
playing “Oleo” by Sonny Rollins)
Until the start of the 1960s, most of the development in jazz harmony had
focused on the expansion of what is commonly referred to as 2-5-1
progressions. To attempt a simplistic explanation of this term: It refers to
four-note chords derived from a common set of scales, with the leading
function of dominant chords into tonic chords as the main building block.
What additional notes are added to the basic dominant four-note chords
decides how the improviser can elaborate – to put it very simply.
Lack of resolution, substitution of chords, and many other principles have
been introduced to give the thinking and eager musician ways to create
tension and release in a coded pattern of musical understanding shared by
performers and audiences alike.
Another simplistic statement would be that the pinnacle of sophistication in
this lone of development – sometimes referred to as hard bop – is John
Coltrane´s composition “Giant Steps” from 1960.
David Liebman suggests some ways of describing practices that have been
established in the jazz world since the 1960s. One of them is the concept of
bitonality, which means that several chords can coexist at the same time in
the internal or external surroundings of an improviser. No hierarchy is given
to these chords, so they can be played for example as arpeggios weaving in
and out of each other. One of the common practices is using mediant chords
for this.
Arpeggiated chords are a common feature in many of the traditional tunes
I´ve absorbed in this project, so I won´t pick a defined phrase, but instead go
for a slight abstraction of the source material this time. Here are some
examples:
(Sound example: arpeggiated chords in various traditional tunes)
Starting out in 4/4 time and basing my phrases on sixteenth notes, I´ll start
out by playing an arpeggio in the root key – in this case, F major.
110
(Sound example: F major arpeggio, descending)
Then I´ll find the nearest tone to change to the sub-mediant, which is Db
major in this case:
(Sound example: Db major arpeggio, descending)
Using the same technique to go to the mediant, which is Ab major in this
case:
(Sound example: Ab major arpeggio, descending)
And then back to the root chord:
(Sound example: F major arpeggio, descending)
I´m giving each chord three notes, so the chord changes won´t happen on the
downbeats all the time.
(Sound example: Bitonal phrase in F over 4/4 beat)
Changing to minor, I´ll do the same thing over the minor chords of F:
(Sound example: F minor arpeggio, descending)
Db:
(Sound example: Db minor arpeggio, descending)
and Ab:
(Sound example: Ab minor arpeggio, descending)
Changing to “three” time, I´ll play the arpeggios as eight-note triplets, but
giving each chord four notes, to (once again) avoid the downbeats.
(Sound example: Bitonal phrase in F major over 3/4 beat)
And finally, I´ll execute the minor idea in “three” time:
111
(Sound example: Bitonal phrase in F minor over 3/4 beat)
The example here started on the third of the chord. I´ll proceed to execute
the same idea from the fifth of the chord, and the root of the chord in all
twelve keys.
97.
98.
99.
100.
101.
102.
103.
104.
105.
106.
107.
108.
Bitonal phrase, F 1:21
Bitonal phrase, C 1:31
Bitonal phrase, G 1:37
Bitonal phrase, D 1:46
Bitonal phrase, A 1:39
Bitonal phrase, E 1:43
Bitonal phrase, B 1:55
Bitonal phrase, F# 1:55
Bitonal phrase, C# 1:26
Bitonal phrase, G# 1:49
Bitonal phrase, D# 1:40
Bitonal phrase, A# 1:40
109.
MINOR THIRD IDEA: PRESENTATION
(3:29)
(Sound example: “Giant Steps”, played on saxophone by John Coltrane)
For many listeners, as I mention elsewhere, this tune represents the
culmination of complexity and grace in the bebop genre in jazz, highlighting
the utensil of so-called 2-5-1 progressions in rapid tempos. One of the main
harmonic relations occurring here is a leap of a minor third as demonstrated
right from the start:
(Sound example:
B maj7 (chord strummed on guitar), up to
D7 (chord strummed on guitar), then
Gmaj7 (chord strummed on guitar), minor third up to
Bb7/13 (chord strummed on guitar) )
112
Consequently, one of the soloist´s choices will naturally be to play the same
phrase transposed around these harmonic centers, as evidenced by this little
outtake from John Coltrane´s own solo:
(Sound example: Minor third transpositions in John Coltrane´s solo on
“Giant Steps”, repeated)
Later in his career, Coltrane would abandon the harmonic complexity in the
ensemble around him, and opt for an ostinato-based music, possibly inspired
by listening to Indian music. However, he would keep the transporting of
little motifs as described above, though the chords he implied by playing
were no longer in the background.
I want to try this technique on a phrase found in two of the tunes found in
my source material:
(Sound example: “Gropen”, as played by Einar Olav Larsen)
and
(Sound example: “Springleik etter Ole Berge”, as played by Sturla Eide)
I´ll practice the phrase as usual, in major and minor – this time, melodic
minor (high sixth and seventh intervals) over beats of four and three
respectively. A little rhythmic dislocation is a result of experimenting next
to the drum machine, and I´ll play some leading-out chords to show that I´m
also practicing listening for the four-bar period to start over.
One more adjustment I made, based on personal taste, is that instead of
playing the phrase in minor third intervals, I´ll play it in its base position:
(Sound example: Minor third phrase in base position)
Then transpose it a minor third and one octave down:
(Sound example: Minor third phrase transposed a minor third up and one
octave down),
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then one minor third up:
(Sound example: Minor third phrase, one minor third up),
then root position:
(Sound example: Minor third phrase in base position)
This means that the phrase is being played from: around the root, the minor
third down one octave, the flattened fifth, and root again. A totally “logical”
model would call for a version of the phrase from yet another minor third up,
i.e. from the sixth interval, but to my ears, that´s when it starts to sound too
related to jazz as opposed to traditional music.
110.
111.
112.
113.
114.
115.
116.
117.
118.
119.
120.
121.
Minor third phrase, F
Minor third phrase, C
Minor third phrase, G
Minor third phrase, D
Minor third phrase, A
Minor third phrase, E
Minor third phrase, B
Minor third phrase, F#
Minor third phrase, C#
Minor third phrase, G#
Minor third phrase, D#
Minor third phrase, A#
1:23
1:21
1:20
1:21
1:19
1:07
1:19
1:21
1:18
1:20
1:19
1:20
122.
JUPITER PHRASE: PRESENTATION
(2:11)
(Sound example: “Jupiter Variation”, played on saxophone by John
Coltrane)
One of the devices John Coltrane used when he abandoned functional
harmony was to play a phrase in its root position, a half-step up, back in the
root position, a major third up, and a fourth up. I seem to recognize this
pattern in the following little excerpt from what you just heard:
(Sound example: “Jupiter Variation” (excerpt), played on saxophone by
John Coltrane)
114
I´ll try to use this way of organizing melodic material in a phrase that can be
found in two of the tunes in my source material. First off is “Springleik etter
Olav Nilsen” played on fiddle by Sturla Eide:
(Sound example: “Springleik etter Olav Nilsen” (excerpt) played on fiddle
by Sturla Eide)
and in “Springleik etter Elling Holstad”, also played by Sturla Eide:
(Sound example: “Springleik etter Elling Holstad” (excerpt) played on fiddle
by Sturla Eide)
I´ll now organize this little arpeggio phrase the same way John Coltrane just
did – in the root position:
(Sound example: arpeggio in root position),
a half step up:
(Sound example: arpeggio in half-step-up position),
root position again:
(Sound example: arpeggio in root position),
a major third up:
(Sound example: arpeggio major-third-up position),
and a fourth up:
(Sound example: arpeggio in fourth-up position)
123.
124.
125.
126.
127.
128.
129.
Jupiter phrase, F
Jupiter phrase, C
Jupiter phrase, G
Jupiter phrase, D
Jupiter phrase, A
Jupiter phrase, E
Jupiter phrase, B
0:57
0:52
0:50
0:48
0:49
0:47
0:50
115
130.
131.
132.
133.
134.
Jupiter phrase, F#
Jupiter phrase, C#
Jupiter phrase, G#
Jupiter phrase, D#
Jupiter phrase, A#
0:48
0:48
0:49
0:49
0:50
135.
BRASILIA PHRASE: PRESENTATION IN F (3:35)
(Sound example: “Brasilia”, played on saxophone by John Coltrane)
As jazz saxophonist John Coltrane´s music developed into the 1960s, he
seemed to rely on playing his way through many shifting tonalities very
quickly, even though he´d left the conventional idea of agreed-upon chord
changes behind. The following is an excerpt from “Brasilia”:
(Sound example: “Brasilia”, played on saxophone by John Coltrane,
repeated)
My ear isn´t capable of catching the structural ideas behind Coltrane´s
playing here. Fortunately, the research on this music has been very thorough,
and I´m indebted here to Jeff Bair, who uses Andrew White´s transcriptions
in his analyis in his Ph. D. dissertation.
Avoiding the beat of each measure, Coltrane seems to be combining
tonalities in mediant relationships, roughly indicating tonal layers that are
major thirds apart. The excerpt you just heard perhaps becomes clearer (if
not prettier) by representing it in a lower tempo with a synthetic saxophone
sound, and with a piano sound striking the chords indicated in White´s
transcription.
The chords are: Db7, down a major third to A7, D, down a major third to
Bb, and down a major third to Gb.
(Sound example: synthetic representation of mediant-based phrase with
piano chords from “Brasilia” by John Coltrane)
116
Based on this idea, I´ll create a halling-like double-stop phrase over the
same harmonic relations over a drone in 4/4. I´m taking a bit more liberty, in
the sense that this phrase is inspired by the fiddle music I´ve already
interpreted, rather than lifted verbatim from any particular tune.
(Sound example: “Brasilia” phrase in major over drone, 4/4)
In minor: I´ll just play the F and F# chords in minor for reasons of hand
movement. I think the difference from the major version is still discernible.
(Sound example: “Brasilia” phrase in minor over drone, 4/4)
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I´ll the play the same phrase in 3/4 pols rhythm.
(Sound example: “Brasilia” phrase in major over drone, 3/4)
And in minor:
(Sound example: “Brasilia” phrase in minor over drone, 3/4)
136.
137.
138.
139.
140.
141.
142.
143.
144.
145.
146.
Brasilia phrase, C 0:57
Brasilia phrase, G 0:58
Brasilia phrase, D 1:08
Brasilia phrase, A 1:05
Brasilia phrase, E 0:59
Brasilia phrase, B 1:02
Brasilia phrase, F# 1:03
Brasilia phrase, C# 0:54
Brasilia phrase, G# 0:59
Brasilia phrase, D# 0:58
Brasilia phrase, A# 0:58
147.
FROM ELISE:
THE VOCAL TRADITION
OF ELISE FLATEN (12:27)
(Sound example: “Paa Hinside Ørken Er Kaanan At Finde”, sung by Elise
Flaten)
The Norwegian term folkemusikk and the English term folk music seem to
hold different meanings. To the English-speaking population in general, a
folk perfomer, it seems to me, can be anything from a singer-songwriter
performing original material, through instrumentalists playing traditional
dance tunes, to folkloristic storytellers. The Norwegian concensus of what a
folk musician is seems to be either instrumentalists or singers with roots in
dance music, or singers maintaining the tradition of functional vocal music,
such as cowherd calls, interspersed with the occasional religious folk song or
middle-age ballad.
The absence of vocal music as source material for my project so far (and I´m
speaking in July 2008) has led me to overcome my doubts and include a
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musical influence not rooted in dance music at all, namely the religious
vocal tradition of Elise Flaten in my work.
Elise Flaten was the grandmother of two of my musician friends, and
throughout her life she was a devout and active Christian, rooted in
congregation life in the village of Oppdal. Flaten´s faith was based on the
teachings of Hans Nilsen Hauge, a rebel priest in the 19th century, whose
independent Lutheran theology despised the power structure and political
games favoured by the clerical forces in Scandinavian society at the time.
Instead, Hauge professed hard work, gratitude for simple earthly subsistence
means, and a yearning for the afterlife that permeates most of the lyrics in
the songs Elise Flaten and her cohorts would sing at their religious meetings.
Flaten, continued)
At a commissioned concert in Oppdal´s house of culture on July 19th, 2008,
twin brothers Ingebrigt and Åsmund Flaten and myself joined forces with
singer Christin Hoff and performed some of the songs discussed here, under
the creative title of “Fra Elise” (“From Elise”), a pun on the Beethoven
piano piece title. Tore Fagerhaug, a local culture enthusiast from Oppdal,
had offered up his transcriptions of the core melodies at the base of Elise
Flaten´s vocal style, and Norwegian public radio (NRK) turned out to have
some field recordings in their vaults.
Our approach to the material had to be liberal, since none of us have sung
these songs on a regular basis in our upbringings, nor do we neccesarily
share the sentiments expressed in the lyrics. Ingebrigt´s prowess as a free
jazz musician, Åsmund´s capabilities as a jack-of-all-trades keyboardist, and
my own interest in anything local and traditional gave Christin´s pop-trained
voice a diverse musical environment.
The process took in influences from many contemporary forms of music,
and as such represented the reverse working order from what I mostly do in
my research project. Shedding a contemporary light on this music turned out
to be a roaring success locally, but for my purposes here, the more
interesting recording to submit is the documentation of my own attempts at
absorbing Elise Flaten´s vocal style. The recordings were very helpful, and
on this sound file you can hear me trying to play along with the recordings
of Elise Flaten. I did this with the greatest reverence, and I would never
119
submit this as a finished product – we actually only introduced a sample of
her voice once during the performance towards the very end.
The four different instruments used here are Hawaiian lap steel guitar (or
Weissenborn), regular six-string guitar, guitar bouzouki, and mandolin. I did
this to have a prepared palette of ways to create variation in the concert.
Flaten, with mandolin imitations)
(“Sound example: “Et Er Nødigt, Dette Ene”, sung by Elise Flaten, with
Weissenborn imitations)
(“Sound example: “Skulle Jeg Min Gud Ei Prise?”, sung by Elise Flaten,
with Weissenborn imitations)
(“Sound example: “Ak Mon Jeg Staar I Naade” sung by Elise Flaten, with
guitar bouzouki imitations)
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These preliminary ventures into Elise Flaten´s singing style in my view
confirm that you loose something when you “even out” a solo vocal
performance like this and interpret it in even meters. On the submitted sound
file, I try to the best of my ability to follow Elise Flaten´s breathing pauses,
and as time went on, I could actually start anticipating, or hearing
beforehand, how long or short her little fermatas were going to be. Instead
of viewing this as, for example, a church organ player struggling to keep the
congregation in even rhythm, I think this could be looked on as a crucial
marker of singing style, and I want to introduce it into my solo
improvisations as an alternative half-way between rhythmically driving
solos and totally rubato ones.
121
(Sound example: Improvisations over religious melodies after Elise Flaten –
solo guitar bouzouki, with attempted imitations of breathing pauses)
FUMBLING EXERCISES
148.
FUMBLING EXERCISE # 1 (4:24)
“Jess”, November 2008
It´s time to start trying to combine the phrase material I´m continously
working on. I´ll experiment by programming some very simple
accompaniments to some of my own compositions, and to improvise over
them with a written cuelist of phrases on a piece of paper in front of me. The
phrases I´ve chosen for this segment are:
- The opening notes from “Et er nødigt, dette ene”, harmonized roughly
in fourths (Sound example):
- A typical Røros pols phrase from the tune “Westberg” (Sound
example):
- A phrase from the second part of “Ril fra Mausundvær” (Sound
example):
122
- An idea of my own: Arpeggios over F major and G major combined
(Sound example):
- And the “Jupiter” Phrase (Sound example):
This strategy will hopefully yield some results over the next few months.
The following is what I achieved on my first day of experimenting.
The chord changes for this section of “Jess” are as follows:
// G11 / G11 / G11 / Bbm6 / G11 / G11 / G11 / Bbm6 / C7 / C7
/ C7 / C7 //:
(Sound example: Fumbling improvisation over the chord changes for “Jess”)
149.
FUMBLING EXERCISE #2 (4:50)
“Grim”, November 25th, 2008
This is another controlled experiment where I improvise over a programmed
accompaniment with a defined list of phrase material on a piece of paper in
front of me. The phrases I´m trying to incorporate are:
123
- The hymn “Skulle Jeg Min Gud Ei Prise” from the Elise Flaten
recordings (Sound example):
- Five phrase #2 (Sound example):
- Bitonal phrase (Sound example):
- Minor third phrase (Sound example):
- Seven phrase (Sound example):
The solo section for my tune “Grim” is based on a static drone in C, so I
hope this will be a good place in my repertoire to introduce tonal expansions
such as these.
(Sound example: Fumbling exercise improvisation, “Grim”)
124
150.
December 2008: “Blink”
This is an attempt at improvising in a pols rhythm over jazz-influenced
chords taken from my own composition. The harmonic foundation for the
solo section of “Blink” consists of four chords, four bars to each chord.
(Sound example: Chord changes for “Blink” with spoken explanation:
Ebmaj7/G , F/A , G/B and F#maj7.)
The phrases I´ll try to implement over these chords are demonstrated here in
the key of F:
- “F-during fra Inndal” (Phrase #12) (Sound example):
- “Gropen” (Phrase #10) (Sound example):
This phrase works from its original position from the third with a high
drone on the fifth, but also from the seventh interval with a high drone on
the ninth, like this:
(Sound example: Phrase # 10 from 7th interval plus 9th interval drone)
(I consider the F chord in these chord changes to suggest a lowered
seventh step (sound example), and the rest of the chords as containing
major seventh steps (sound example)). The context for this can for
example be taken from master fiddler Gunnar Stubseid´s recording of the
tune “Reisaren”, where I get the impression that jumping from one string
pair to the one above it (or below it) creates possibilities.
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(Sound example: excerpt from “Reisaren”, Gunnar Stubseid)
- “Polka Dalakopa” (Phrase #5)
I´ll experiment with playing the phrase from its original position on the
third with a low drone on the fifth, as well as from the root note position
with a low drone on the third, like this:
(Sound example: Phrase # 5 in two inversions)
- “Reinlender etter Harald Gillan” (Phrase #9).
Since this phrase is originally in 4/4, I´ll have to make it “bite its own
tail” towards the very end:
(Sound example: Phrase # 9)
- The next phrase is from “Grenseslått”, where I take the full rhythmic
profile from the first four measures:
(Sound example: Phrase # 1, rhythmic profile transposed to F major)
And the last phrase here is
- Five phrase #2.
(Sound example: Five phrase # 2)
126
(Sound example: Fumbling improvisation on chord changes for “Blink”)
151.
“Dino”, February 2009
In my discussion about Pat Metheny´s influence on me, I touch upon how
I´d like to take his method of introducing a busier rhythmic level in the
improvisation section than the melody presentation contains. The phrases
I´ve chosen for vehicle establishment in this tune all try to create various
rhythmic doubling effects, and they all contain either double-stops or
arpeggios, since this tune travels over a set of chords in two different keys
and contains some 2/4 measures. I hope to develop double-time solo playing
that sounds free and relaxed, while helping the listener perceive the chord at
any given time. As with all these exercises, they are just that: exercises. The
finished result will hopefully sound more graceful and spontaneous than this.
The phrases I´ve chosen for this exercise, demonstrated in the opening key
of D major here, are:
- Phrase # 5, from “Polka Dalakopa”. Since this phrase has such a fresh
rhythmic pull, I´ve decided to play it from its original position from
the third, as well as from the fifth, and the root.
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(Sound example: Phrase # 5 in three inversions)
- Phrase # 8, from “Bruremarsj fra Brekstad”
- Phrase #7, from “Reinlender 122”:
- A five-group phrase inspired by the ones already rehearsed:
(Sound example: Own five-group phrase)
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- Phrase #1, from “Grenseslått”, transferred here from 9/8 to 4/4:
(Sound example: Phrase # 1 transferred from 9/8 to 4/4)
- Phrase #3, from “Halling etter Lars Voldøyhaug”:
A simplified version of the chord changes for “Dino” are:
(Sound example: Programmed chord changes for “Dino” with spoken
explanation of chords. Continues into fumbling exercise improvisation)
/ D / Em / A / A - G / D - G /2/4 A /4/4 A //:
/ Bb / Cm / F / Eb – Bb / Bb - Eb /2/4 F /4/4 F /
/ F /2/4 Eb /4/4 Ab /
129
152.
FUMBLING EXERCISE # 5 (3:34)
“Os”, February, 2009
I follow the same procedure as for the other fumbling exercises.
- The first phrase, #13, is from “Ellein”:
- Next is the “Composite phrase”:
- Phrase # 14, from “Springleik etter Lapp-Nils og Harald Gillan”:
- Then comes “Five phrase # 1”:
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- And finally, “Phrase # 2” from “Springleik etter Elling Holstad”:
The improvised section for my tune “Os” starts out with only percussive
accompaniment, eventually moving into a chord cycle that goes :
/ Dm / Dm / Ebmaj7 / Ebmaj7 / Bb / Bb / Fm / Fm /
…round and round…
(Sound example: Fumbling attempts at placing phrases in “Os” chord
changes)
INFLUENCES
153.
INFLUENCES:
MARTIN HAYES AND DENNIS CAHILL
(9:17)
(Sound example: “Paul Ha´penny”, played on fiddle and guitar by Martin
Hayes and Dennis Cahill)
Martin Hayes is a master fiddler from County Clare in the West of Ireland,
and hails from a family and environment of musicians. He represents a slow,
calm style of fiddling that emphasizes clarity and consciousness far removed
from the roaring exuberance so often heard in pub sessions and stage
productions of Celtic music. Technique and repertoire are not issues he
discusses in his reflections; he has them both in abundance. Instead, finding
the inner character that sets each little tune apart is what he appears to have
dedicated his life to. Verging on the brink of new-age solemnity, his
musings on album covers and websites reveal a musician willing to go to the
central traits of a tradition, pull them apart, put them back together, and reemerge with something that´s not been structurally changed in hundreds of
years, yet glowing with a contemporary transcendence, melodic
understanding and implied rhythmic swing that takes a lifetime to achieve.
131
In actual practice, I seem to find that the much-hyped "hypnotic" quality
Hayes and his guitarist Dennis Cahill seem to evoke from their repertoire of
traditional Clare music is a result of patient melodic internalization, a vast
resource pool of unobtrusive ornamentation techniques, little or no musical
material outside the melodic shapes themselves, accompaniments largely
employing common functional harmony, and, to get to the main point, an
acceptance of the musical pull at the very point of repetition. !
(Sound example: “The Broken Pledge”, played on fiddle and guitar by
Martin Hayes and Dennis Cahill)
By "point of repetition", I refer to the very point where a tune has come to
the end of a run-through and is restarted. The Hayes/Cahill duo seem to steer
away from the notion that repetition is a limitation. Instead of the "oh damn,
here comes the A part again, we´d better dress it up differently so the
audience doesn´t get bored" line of thinking, they seem to trust the quality of
the tune in question enough to leave it as it was the first time, perhaps with a
miniscule bow triplet or some other ornament, but more often than not
letting the ear of the listener rest in the repetition of the melody itself - even
those among us with little or no ear training have at least a fleeting memory
of a melodic phrase used to open a melody thirty seconds earlier.!
(Sound example: “The Mother and Child Reel”, played on fiddle and guitar
by Martin Hayes and Dennis Cahill)
At the moment, I´m fascinated by the future possibilites the concept of
repetition opens in the field of improvisation. It is my impression that
improvising soloists in the mainstream jazz vein are subconsciously trying to
create eight-or-sixteenth-note lines that flow and shift gracefully over
harmonic progressions, and employ repetition only to break this flow, for
example through occasional blues-based "howls" as heard in many of Pat
Metheny´s solos.
(Sound example: “Every Summer Night”, played by Pat Metheny Group)
I´m curious to see if the adamant quality of repetition found in for example
Martin Hayes´ and Dennis Cahill´s melody-interpreting music can be put to
use in my own improvisations, using recurring little motifs as “pegs” for the
listener.
132
The following is an improvisation I recorded on August 1st, 2008, where I
try to keep this mentality in mind.
(Sound example: Improvisation, August 1st, 2008)
154.
INFLUENCES:
PAT METHENY, CHARLIE HADEN
AND THE ART OF THE DUO
(14:00)
(Sound example: “The Moon´s a Harsh Mistress”, played on guitar and bass
by Pat Metheny and Charlie Haden)
I could have filled many hours showing how important American jazz
guitarist Pat Metheny has been to several generations of musicians and
musiclovers. For my purposes here, I´ll show restraint and give a brief
background, and then discuss how I´ve been directly influenced by his duo
record with bassist Charlie Haden, “Beyond the Missouri Sky”, from 1996.
Pat Metheny may have one of the highest work rates in modern music
history. His upbringing in the Midwest of the United States was dominated
by an early interest in jazz and bossa nova recordings, and his music college
teachers in Miami converted his role from that of a student to a faculty
member after only six months. Since he made his recording debut with
vibraphone player Gary Burton in the late seventies, hardly a year seems to
have gone by without some kind of new Metheny-related record on the
shelves. His own Pat Metheny Group has always aimed for an orchestral
approach, researching the possibilities for elaborate compositions and
arrangements to complement improvisations. His early Brazilian influences
are always close to the surface, but North African, classical, country, pop
and free jazz (or harmolodic) strains also weave in and out to create a sound
instantly recognizable to music fans – a sound that´s attacked by jazz critics
for being too polished and mainstream to constitute progressive art.
(Sound example: “Beat 70” played by Pat Metheny Group)
Perhaps as a counterweight to the stringent nature of the larger Group
projects and tours, Metheny habitually performs music that reflects his high
regard for, and tough training in, the jazz tradition. These records move
more along improvisational paths, and follow conventional forms, in
133
smaller, traditional settings like trios or quartets, such as his recent
recordings with pianist Brad Mehldau.
(Sound example: “Say the Brother´s Name”, played by Pat Metheny and
Brad Mehldau)
Metheny´s sharp ear for detail has made him one of the most inventive users
of technology to enhance guitar sound, and his ideas about signal splits and
reverb use, among other things, have been important inspirations for me.
This ear for tone production and sound processing is very present on
“Beyond the Missouri Sky”. In tandem with Charlie Haden, Metheny tackles
original compositions, jazz standards and film music, with some discreet
overdubbing of synthesizers and additional guitar and bass. I take great
inspiration from how I can listen to “Beyond the Missouri Sky” over and
over and still find surprises, nuances and subtleties that have eluded me
before – be they pitch choices in the solos, references to various music
styles, or just the plain fact that two is sometimes more than enough. The
most familiar tune from this album is, for many listeners, “Precious Jewel”,
a country song by Roy Acuff. Metheny employs another of his trademarks
here; the rapid accompaniments on steel string acoustic guitar, that many
jazz critics mistakenly refer to as a “country” inflection; it actually has more
in common with Irish and Celtic guitar playing in traditional music from the
1960s and onwards. Metheny himself simply refers to it as “wrist”.
(Sound example: “The Precious Jewel”, played by Pat Metheny and Charlie
Haden)
But it´s another, less obvious musical feature I´m more curious to investigate
on this favorite record of mine. On the track “The Moon´s a Harsh
Mistress”, written by songwriter Jimmy Webb and made famous by Glen
Campbell, Radka Toneff and others, I find a performance trick I´ll try to
emulate: For the whole presentation of the theme, Metheny and Haden
move in a ballad pulse with even eight notes. The melody itself is never busy
enough to touch upon the sixteenth-note resolution. When the guitar solo
begins, however, a swung-sixteenth-note-feel suddenly appears, and I find
myself wondering how long it´s been present in the performer´s minds
without being played.
(Sound example: “The Moon´s a Harsh Mistress”, beginning of guitar solo,
played by Pat Metheny and Charlie Haden)
134
The subject of phrasing in Pat Metheny´s solos, and in the solos of a myriad
of jazz musicians, could of course be the subject of a separate PhD. But this
specific trick of holding back the densest layer of rhythm has relevance to
my project. In my own composition “Dino”, dedicated to Argentinian
bandoneon player Dino Saluzzi, it seems that my consciousness of rhythmic
layers is something that needs to come uncorked. This rehearsal recording
from June 2008 with my bass player Jon Rune Strøm is unfulfilled
creatively, and though the mood of the piece perhaps aspires to some of the
patience and authority shown by Metheny and Haden, I´ll need to
consciously work on holding back the sixteenth-note feel until the solo
starts. This will hopefully give me a better momentum in improvisation than
I seem to have at the moment, and perhaps a better development of the
performance in the listener´s ear. In a drummerless setting like this I think
it´s important to be conscious about rhythms that are felt, but not necessarily
played.
(Sound example: “Dino”, played by myself and Jon Rune Strøm (bass), in
rehearsal, June 2008)
155.
INFLUENCES: ALE MÖLLER
(14:17)
(Sound example: “Syster Glas”, played on mandola by Ale Möller)
Norway, like many other countries, has many families that keep traditional
music alive. Recruitment to the field, consequently, is seen as a function of
heritage inside the core family or immediately outside it, sometimes in small
rural communities that constitute cultural pockets in the pre-industrial,
anthropological sense. Though Norwegian families such as Buen, Bjørgum
and Larsen (my own supervisor and his offspring) may seem to indicate that
genetic and close-environment heritage plays a strong role in keeping up the
performance practices and repertoires in folk music, I tend to look for, and
find, performers that share my story of coming into this musical field from
wildly different angles, and sometimes long after childhood. Ale Möller is
one of my musical role models who started out as an outsider but got
converted to traditional music as a grown-up.
(Sound example: “Slängpolskor”, played by NorDan)
135
After spending his formative years in Malmö in southern Sweden playing
jazz, blues and rock, Möller moved to Greece, where he studied and
performed the intricate style of rembetika. The bouzouki became his primary
instrument, and he brought the idea of a four-course, double-stringed
instrument with him back to Sweden, along with a newfound awareness to
the importance of regional and national identity and pride in the cultural
field. Many years of learning and playing Swedish folk music in the Dalarna
region ensued, and over the years he has aquired depht and authority as a
leading figure in Scandinavian traditional music, blending improvisation into
the mix, playing a myriad of instruments, and collaborating with various
instrument makers in making instruments in the cittern family that expand
his range and give him access to the microtonality found in music from
before the emergence of equal temper. Along with his long-time
collaborator, singer and fiddler Lena Willemark, he has also revived a lot of
music from medieval times as a result of a yearning for more spacious forms
to improvise from and within.
My primary loan from Ale Möller´s impressive body of work is the idea of
playing custom-made mandolas/bouzoukis/citterns in traditional music,
often taking very low pitches into use to create majestic, rubato intros in a
semi-improvised fashion. I say “semi-improvised” because a lot of times
these starting-off points in Möller´s musicmaking are segments of the tune
that is to follow, only freed from regular pulses.
(Sound example: intro for “Kolarepolska” (“Charcoal burner´s polska”),
played by Frifot)
And this is me trying to assimilate the same introductory approach to a full
solo improvisation based on phrase material from the Trøndelag area:
(Sound example: solo improvisation influenced by Ale Möller)
But improvisation, it seems, can also take a collective form in Ale Möller´s
music. In several interviews, he talks about how entire pieces can come into
existence on stage know the material well enough, as music journalist Cliff
Furnald relates:
“Both on record and in concert, Willemark, Möller, and the many
musicians they work with, have gone beyond “folk-fusion” and have
entered a realm unexplored by most musicians coming from a folk
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tradition. A song may start with some small percussion or a solo
fiddle line, Willemark improvising a melody or chanting a phrase,
Möller dancing among his mandolas, harps, birch bark horns and
hammered dulcimer, exploring the colours of the voices and
instruments, building a mood that suddenly becomes the song. The
power of this approach is that the songs become universal, the
language becomes less opaque, the story clear even to those who do
not know the language”.
(Sound example: “Slängpolskor”, played by NorDan, continued)
If one is to strip away the journalistic enthusiasm for this music and look at
the core of what this quote holds, one could argue that this is not dissimilar
to the telepathy-like composition-on-the-spot processes that jazz bassist John
Pattitucci describes in relation to playing with Wayne Shorter elsewhere.
A word on rhythm:
The main difference between the polskas the way Möller and his cohorts
perform them and the Norwegian pols seems to be that our brothers and
sisters to the east play in even eight-note, six-eights time, opening up for a
lot of syncopation, and – crucially – the chance to play “across the barline” a
lot more than we do here. One example of this rhythm is the track
“Slängpolskor” from the “Agram” album by NorDan3:
(Sound example: “Slängpolskor”, played by NorDan, continued)
I run into problems when I try to apply the inspiration I get from this musical
feature, because pols from the Trøndelag area (except Røros) seems to
favour a clear, easy-to-understand emphasis on the first beat of each
measure. This has a lot of consequenses for the way Swedish music can be
arranged and propelled forward, and trying to introduce this bouncing time
perception in my arrangements of Norwegian music has been tricky. This is
one of the many reasons I am trying to compose in a more open-ended form,
leaving the core material from traditional Norwegian music for my
improvisational raw material rather than for the tunes themselves.
3
This applies roughly to the Eastern half of Sweden, I´ve come to learn.
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156.
INFLUENCES: ANOUAR BRAHEM
(AND THE PROBLEM OF
ONE OF MY PIECES) (14:13)
(Sound example: “Sur le Fleuve”, played on oud, piano and accordeon by
Anouar Brahem, Francois Coutourier and Jean Louis Matinier)
Anouar Brahem is a performer whose work has helped inspire and define my
hopes and ideals in the artistic research program, despite the fact that his
launching pad is Arabic music and mine is Scandinavian. This is no place
for in-depth biographies or discographies, but some brief details about his
background and career may be appropriate for those unfamiliar with his
work.
Brahem was trained in the intricate field of classical Arabic improvisation
since childhood. He discovered early on that the role of the arabic lute he
plays, the oud, was usually that of accompanying singers, and he began
giving solo recitals to expand the role and repertoire within the idiom
handed down to him by his teacher, Ali Sriti. A four-year tenure in Paris
ensued, where he composed music for coreographer Maurice Béjart as well
as for film maker Constantin Costa-Gavras. Upon returning to Tunisia,
Brahem accepted a position as director for the Musical Ensemble of the City
of Tunis, which he promptly broke up into several smaller ensembles, rather
than the big format favoured by previous leaders. Several prestigious
performances and international tours followed, and from 1990 onwards he
has worked extensively with the German label ECM, under the production
auspices of Manfred Eicher, famed for his collaborations with Jan Garbarek,
Keith Jarrett, and many others. The music from the period immediately
preceding Brahem´s recording career on ECM and onwards seems to move
more freely across several genres and boundaries than purely Arabic music,
yet seems to retain a strong sense of heritage and tradition. This is, according
to the authors of Brahem´s website, is partly due to the extensive use of
improvisation in the tradition he started out studying. Brahem´s ECM
records are the ones to have reached my ears, particularly "Astrakan Café"
and "Le Voyage de Sahar".
Anouar Brahem, Francois Coutourier and Jean Louis Matinier, continued)
138
Both of these records are trio offerings, the former with clarinet and hand
drum, the latter with accordion and piano. As always on the ECM
productions, minute attention is given to each instrument´s potential to
unfold, use of silence is predominant, and I get the feeling of listening to
musicians who are not forced to challenge their technical or physical
limitations. Though some attentive post-production is likely to have taken
place, the recordings were made in naturally resonant rooms, such as the
Austrian monastery used for "Astrakhan Café". The probing into new
territories goes along lines and methods such as the chamber music-like
blending of musical traditions in a confined space, lengthy and meditative
improvisations (often over drone-based foundations or no played
foundations at all), clarity of modal scale choices, and melodic concepts that
only stray occasionally from what I subjectively think the Western ear can
absorb as coded-but-sometimes-fresh during a first sitting. Tempos are never
very quick, but I hear this music as very intense nevertheless.
Anouar Brahem, Francois Coutourier and Jean Louis Matinier, continued:
piano solo segment)
As mentioned in the section called "Sonics and Timbre", I have attempted to
borrow the sound of the oud, especially as it appears in the music of Anouar
Brahem and Iraqi maestro Munir Bashir. The construction of the Rian guitar
bouzouki helped me bring an equivalent of the “greyish” midrange sound of
the arabic stringed instrument into my own interpretations of Norwegian
traditional music as well as my own compositions and improvisations. The
foremost similarity between the oud and my instrument is that they´re both
stringed in unison pairs, but the former uses nylon-like strings quite similar
to the western classical guitar, and the latter employs bronze-wound and
plain steel strings, as you can hear here:
(Sound example: Introduction vamp from “Os”, played on guitar bouzouki,
tuba and clarinet by me, Daniel Herskedal and Morten Michelsen)
One of many sound qualities I´m unable to imitate from the oud is the
occasional sliding of notes, which is a result of a fretless fretboard.
(Sound example: “Sur le Fleuve”, played on oud by Anouar Brahem, oud
solo segment)
139
Aside from the sonic quality of the oud, I have been inspired by Brahem´s
records to think about my own role in ensemble playing in ways that are new
to me. Whereas my typical way of arranging traditional tunes or performing
my own compositions means sticking to the chord-melody model (that is,
playing several functions at once and straying into occasional simple
polyphony), there are no such features in Brahem´s playing style, nor in that
of any other Arabic lutenist I have heard. Single-note melodies and
improvisations are the norm, punctuated from time to time by double-stops.
The instrument´s lack of sustain is compensated with note repetition in
rhythmic keeping with the piece being played, and sophisticated ornaments
such as plectrum trills and pre-note rolls are frequently to be heard. On "Le
Voyage de Sahar" Brahem dispenses with the darbuka handdrum altogether,
opting for accordeon and piano as his sonic environment. The rhythmic
drive is never lost, though, a clear indication that Brahem´s theories about
the oud ´s possibilities as a leading instrument hold water.
solo segment)
The most definite example of Brahem´s influence on my music is probably
the piece "Os" from the spring of 2007. It was first tried out in a trio with
tubaist Daniel Herskedal and clarinet player Morten Michelsen, and it had
been a challenge for me to perform this piece well on the guitar bouzouki.
This is probably because the piece was created in the Sibelius notation
program, a technique I sometimes apply when writing, to prevent
instrument-specific lines from showing up too much in my compositions
(this is a problem that musicians sometimes, more eloquently, call "to avoid
using your licks for the tunes").
(Sound example: Unison melody section of “Os”, played on guitar bouzouki,
tuba and clarinet by me, Daniel Herskedal and Morten Michelsen)
What I tried to do is to borrow melodic profiles from the Norwegian
traditional piece "Halling etter Lars Voldøyhaug", but I rearranged the
pitches so that the melodic content leaves the major/minor tonality from time
to time. I also broke away from the predominant 4/4 time signature to try to
create a less period-bound compositional structure. But the whole piece
seemed to "stutter" a bit as it unfolded, perhaps because the different
sections were composed at different times and have slightly different
140
demands for tempi. This could perhaps be negotiated at a later stage, given
that the musicians involved are highly perceptive and well trained to meet
challenges such as tempo variations within one and the same piece.
(Sound example: Unison melody section of “Os”, continued, played on
guitar bouzouki, tuba and clarinet by me, Daniel Herskedal and Morten
Michelsen)
Later on in my piece (that you´re hearing rehearsal recordings of here), I
borrow another technique from Anouar Brahem in that I dispense with my
fellow musicians for a little while and improvise alone, travelling over
several tonal centres, and this is a device I think I´ll come back to using later
on in the project. Here´s first Anouar Brahem improvising alone from the
record “Le Voyage de Sahar”:
solo segment)
And this is me in the same primitive rehearsal recording you´ve been
listening to, trying to take example from Anouar Brahem and trying to have
in mind the very tranquil quality of his solo improvisations:
(Sound example: “Os”, continued, guitar bouzouki solo segment)
I need to make my improvisations more evocative in the sense that a singlenote line, improvised or composed, should be able to suggest (rhythmic)
traditional musical values, free from double-stops, chords or other elements
that strain and limit myself and my fellow musicians in performance. In
conclusion:
- My single-note lines need to flow more organically when playing melodies
or improvisations, and
- I need to take less responsibility for chords and bass notes when playing
melodies or improvising with other musicians.
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157.
INFLUENCES: BILL FRISELL
(AND THE IMPORTANCE
OF FLEETING IMPRESSIONS)
(11:07)
(Sound example: “Gimme a Holler”, played on guitar by Bill Frisell, and
various other musicians)
Sometimes inspiration comes not in the form of a performer´s definite
method, but more as a listening experience that creates an afterthought that
may turn out useful in a very different space than the performer in question
inhabits. These kinds of influences are the hardest to describe and justify,
since they don´t trigger an imitative work process, but function more as an
example to be answered, not copied. It is a paradox that some of the most
important and indispensable artists in my record collection are performers
whose sound have nothing in common with my present musical identity.
various other musicians, continued)
Bill Frisell is a product of the bustling scene in New York who´s had a
career that´s seen him function in environments ranging from recurring
conventional jazz settings such as his 2007 trio with drummer Paul Motian
and Ron Carter, athmospheric drone-based improvisation such as his tenure
with Jan Garbarek in the early 1980s, collage-organized noise composition
in the John Zorn-led Naked City collective in the 1990s, solo improvisations
with live sampling and looping in the early noughties, collaborations with
storytelling singers in the grey area between European burlesque and pop
music such as Marianne Faithfull, and his reconstruction of songs and
traditional tunes from the old-time, country music Appalachian heritage,
often in tandem with multi-instrumentalist Greg Leisz.
Frisell´s approach to country music, to use a dubious and worn-out term, is
of special interest to me. On his record “Nashville”, he collaborates with
some of the most in-demand acoustic studio musicians in that city, people
who are brought up on high-speed bluegrass instrumentals, vocal harmonies
from religious mountain music, and all the forms that have emanated from
this. The same musicians, such as Dobro player Jerry Douglas, play on very
coded, perfectionist pop-country productions such as Allison Krauss´
records, but when Frisell employs them something different happens. He
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seems to use an almost “slow motion” method structurally, making do with
raw material for minutes on end that in the Nashville studio threadmill
would constitute an intro at most, letting little motifs churn around and
around in a seemingly naïve way, and letting the musicians interact
improvisationally in a semi-open soundscape. Sonically, Frisell opts for an
electric guitar role that fills in the frequency range usually filled by the pedal
steel guitar in country music, but with less out-to-impress bends, runs and
chord inversions than are commonly found in Nashville.
various other musicians, continued)
The result is, to my ears, a personal evocation of US-American country
music rather than a mindless study of it. I get the impression of listening to a
good musician who´s heard country music in passing on his car radio, but
the demands on him in traffic have prevented him from getting any
recordings to actually rehearse to and study (I´m sure this is not the case in
actual fact). Or, even more far-fetched, this could be a musician trying to
remember what country music sounded like, many years after it died and on
the other side of the world from its origins. For this music, another one of
my tentative terms could perhaps be “Country Impressionism”.
The music you´ve been listening to in the background here is called “Gimme
A Holler”, it´s the opening track of Bill Frisell´s “Nashville” record, and to
my ears, it seems to confirm this “impressionistic approach” to country
music, something the New York Times has called an “anti-technique” - but
I don´t think Bill Frisell can be perceived as anything but a very trained
musician. Even so, his approach on the “Nashville” record seems to have
been very spontaneous, impressionistic, and maybe not just a little bit
whimsical, at least if you are to believe his own reflections about this record.
In an interview with the Seattle Times, Bill Frisell says:
“It was a mind-opening experience to play with these guys for the first time.
In a way, I was lucky that I didn´t know what I was doing. I didn´t try to
play in that style, I just put what I do in that context. It would have been a
disaster if I would have tried to play “country”. I didn´t know if it was a
definitive moment – but I know it influenced everything that came after”
(Sound example: “Shenandoah”, played on guitars by Bill Frisell and Ry
Cooder, with various other musicians)
143
A slightly different approach to traditional North American music, and
perhaps a bit more liberal in its relationship with the melodic source
material, the way Frisell renders the folk song “Shenandoah” in live
performances. I´ve heard him perform this with an array of loop boxes and
only briefly visited the melody towards the very end. Here´s a segment of
his version of the same song in a duet recording with guitarist Ry Cooder:
(Sound example: “Shenandoah”, played on guitars by Bill Frisell and Ry
Cooder, with various other musicians, continued)
My composition “Jimbo” from April of 2007 perhaps illustrates my own
version of this way of working. Though i wasn´t conscious of Frisell´s
influence on me when I wrote it, in retrospect I think it kind of mirrors an
evocation of traditional Norwegian pols tunes, in the same way that the
generalizing music press likes to term Bill Frisell´s music along the lines of
“the echoes of Americana”. Maybe I should start using the word
“Norwegiana” about my own music during gigs.
(Sound example: “Jimbo”, played on guitar bouzouki by me)
In actual fact, “Jimbo” held three definite tasks for me that I set up for
myself when I wrote it: First, trying to get away from the open-string keys of
F, C and G on my new guitar bouzouki (the tune is in D but travels over
several tonal centres). Second, the idea of slowing the pols rhythm down to a
pace almost similar to US-American gospel and blues music, and third: the
idea I´m always pursuing: trying to create guitar tunes within the rhythmic
genre of Norwegian traditional music, but with a slightly larger harmonic
and melodic vocabulary than the genre has contained until now.
The chords for “Jimbo” will also constitute a platform for improvisation
elsewhere in my project.
(Sound example: “Jimbo”, played on guitar bouzouki by me)
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CONTEXT
158.
CONTEXT: JAN GARBAREK
(12:39)
(Sound example: “In Praise of Dreams”, played on saxophone by Jan
Garbarek, with various other musicians)
It is my distinct impression that most people, myself included, can´t hear the
two words “Norwegian” and “improvisation” in one sentence without
thinking of Jan Garbarek, whose distinctive saxophone sound, genrecrossing music and wide-ranging appeal has made him one of the most the
most listened-to Norwegian musicians in history. Though I´ve alternately
enjoyed, disliked, admired and mused over his music for almost three
decades, his work seems to have more of a recreational function in my life
than a methodically inspirational one. His importance, however, should
never be belittled. In my reflections here, I am indebted to Tor Dybo and his
book “Jan Garbarek - det åpne roms estetikk” (“Jan Garbarek – the aesthetic
of open space”), as well as the lecture notes by Carl Petter Opsahl, published
on his website.
What does Garbarek´s Norwegianness consist of?
First of all, I think it is necessary to discard the journalistic labels such as
“Nordic”, “Mountainous” “Fjord-like” and several others that Japanese and
US-American writers in particular seem to favour. Norwegian writer Johs.
Berg, in his critique of Garbarek´s album “Dansere” in the Norwegian
magazine Jazznytt, once said:
“This band sounds like no other ensemble we know of in the world today, it
has a kind of music all of its own, and since there are no other labels to stick
on it we´d better call it Nordic”.
I can concur with Berg´s scepticism, and my personal speculation is that a
lot of foreign critics seem to envisage a saxophone being played, one long,
wailing note after another, in the middle of a mountain range in order to
echo back from nature itself. That is, the conjecturing of natural scenery
(although rapidly evaporating) in our corner of the world is what pins
Garbarek´s music to Norway and Scandinavia in a lot of people´s minds.
145
The performer himself, apparently, works with the proverbial nuts and bolts
within his craft, and if he is to be believed in Dybo´s interviews, has a
humoristic and relaxed attitude to terms like “Fjord-saxophone”, “Tundra”,
“Reindeer-saxophone” (believe it or not) and “Polar bear sax”. My own
observation: Floating synthesizer drones, perfectly executed wails on a
saxophone with elaborate digital reverberation, or even a snowstorm being
played over the speakers as a concert introduction does not Norwegian
music make. I personally find it gorgeous and impressive, though, and
choose to relate to most of Garbarek´s music as his personal body of work,
that should in no way be tied down by “ambassadorial” obligations.
(Sound Example: “Bruremarsj”, played on saxophone, bass and drums by
Jan Garbarek, Arild Andersen and Edward Vesala)
The Norwegian influences that can be found in Garbarek´s music, however,
are first of all to be found be found in interpretations of existing folk tunes,
specifically from the 1972 album “Triptykon” and onwards. On this album, a
free jazz soundscape is created around a nuptial match (that you just heard)
from the Gudbrandsdalen valley in Southern Norway.
1976 saw the release of the album “Dansere” by the Bobo Stenson Quartet,
where Garbarek brought several traditional melodies to the table. “Lokk
Etter Thorvald Tronsgaard” is Garbarek´s interpretation of a cowherd call.
(Sound example: “Lokk etter Thorvald Tronsgaard”, played on saxophone
by Jan Garbarek with Bobo Stenson Quartet)
Leading up to the 1981 album “Eventyr” (“Fairytales”) with Brazilian
percussionist Nana Vasconcelos and US-american jazz guitarist John
Abercrombie, Garbarek studied recordings at the University of Oslo´s
library of traditional Norwegian singers such as Eli Kvåle from Bygland in
Aust-Agder. The traditional melodies create frameworks for improvisations
by the musicians involved throughout the record, and the titles for this album
draw on common phrases from folk tales, such as “Snipp, snapp snute” – a
common ending of the stories in this literature.
(Sound example: “Snipp, Snapp, Snute”, played on sap flute, percussion and
guitar by Jan Garbarek, Nana Vasconcelos and John Abercrombie)
146
Another Norwegian influence in Garbarek´s music is the fact that he uses
instruments from the traditional domain: Since the early days of his career,
he has employed the sap flute, or seljefløyte, a Norwegian traditional
instrument with only the natural scale available, as opposed to the equaltemper, 12-tone system of modern times. Garbarek has also been known to
occasionally use the Meråker clarinet, for example on his own composition
“The Scythe” from the 1996 album “The Visible World”.
(Sound example: “The Scythe”, played on Meråker clarinet by Jan
Garbarek)
The collaborative curiosity that seems to recur in Garbarek´s career has led
him to play with Indian, Brazilian and Norwegian traditional musicians, and
that´s where I seem to find another “Norwegian” aspect of his music. The
album “Rosensfole” is a duet project with master singer Agnes Buen Garnås,
and the repertoire consists largely of compressed versions of very old ballad
songs, sometimes shortened down from hundreds of verses. On this record,
Garbarek makes use of his skill with programmed percussion pattterns,
utilizing sounds from the whole world, broad and calm synthesizer drones,
and the distinctive saxophone solos that are the product of his own
absorption work, but not based on Norwegian playing practices.
(Sound example: “Rosensfole” sung by Agnes Buen Garnås, synthesizer
programming and saxophone by Jan Garbarek)
Some liberal interpretations of traditional melodies occur in his saxophone
playing, though:
“I have never asked her (Agnes Buen Garnås) to sing differently from what
she´d typically do. But on the other hand I have taken the liberty of learning
a few melodies to play on the saxophone, and I play them differently. That
must be permitted. But obviously, that´s the way it has to be”. (Garbarek in
Dybo, 1996, my translation).
(Sound example: “Rosensfole” sung by Agnes Buen Garnås, synthesizer
programming and saxophone by Jan Garbarek, continued)
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159.
CONTEXT: SONICS, TIMBRE,
AND THE CURRENT NORWEGIAN SCENE (8:53)
(Sound example: “Feeder”, played on trumpet and electronics by Nils Petter
Molvær)
It has been my impression for quite some time that a lot of the groundbreaking rhythmic improvised music going on in Norway relies to a great
extent on sounds and timbres that seem to have become markers of a lot of
music made from the mid-1990s and onwards. Heavily compressed
electronic tones, often with a great degree of distortion of one kind or the
other, and a penchant for exploring the extreme lower end of the frequency
range has been explored by performers such as Nils Petter Molvær (that you
just heard), Bugge Wesseltoft, Wibutee, and Eivind Aarseth – artists
occasionally referred to as “the Norwegian electronica scene”. I am
sometimes left with an inner mental image of a collage-like journey through
artificially lit and desolate cityscapes after attending concerts performed by
the artists mentioned above. It is probably a relevant sonic projection of the
life and state many people find themselves in these days, an assumption that
seems to be supported by impressive record sales and substantial concert
audiences.
(Sound example: “Astra”, played on hardanger fiddle by Annbjørg Lien, and
various musicians)
Modern performers in the field of traditional music seem to be taking a route
of combining these electronica elements (that are almost definable as a genre
by now) with clear-cut instruments and practises from folk music. Annbjørg
Lien´s music, for example, joins drum loops, synthesizers, and masterful
hardanger fiddle playing, and others have followed. Internationally, Simon
Emmerson´s English multi-artist project “The Imagined Village” from 2007
takes much of the same route sonically, though the overriding ambition of
the project aims to get past the “global fusion” term that has run into some
aesthetic problems since the 1980s.
(Sound example: “John Barleycorn”, played by The Imagined Village)
(Sound example: “Evocation”, played on trumpet and electronics by Arve
Henriksen)
148
In Norway, some performers seem to take different routes. Electronic
trumpeter Arve Henriksen (that you just heard) and traditional fiddler Nils
Økland use widely different sonic tools, but to me they seem to share an
interest in letting miniscule musical elements take centre stage. Henriksen´s
talent for letting one-note phrases, echoes, or even noises from his
equipment be the carrying entity in many of his pieces seems to have
something in common with Økland´s courage in exposing the beauty and
depth in what could be mistaken for a tune-up or a whimsical phrase. This
concentration may have something in common with Brian Eno´s thoughts on
designing two-second snippets for Microsoft in the 1990s – focusing on
small elements does something with you consciousness, as Bill Frisell
discusses elsewhere in my project. Here´s Nils Økland:
(Sound example: Nils Økland playing “Håstabø” on fiddle)
My project, while aiming at doing something that hasn´t been done before,
uses a very limited amount of electronics, and the listener would be hard
pressed to find any elements of distortion or other sonic vehicles normally
associated with fracture, dislocation or disturbance. The instruments played
are acoustic ones, reproduced with the greatest care for traditional “beauty”,
and craftsmanship in the form of live performances. My producer and I have
opted for a traditional route in the sound production as well: Reverbs are
lush, and instruments are represented as truthfully as possible, helped gently
along, however, by equalization and slight compression. I´m told by my
listeners the perception of time passing in my music is calm, and at my most
daring I´ll move just slightly outside the commonly accepted codes for
functional harmony. Instinctively, I feel a need to make a lot of elements
from traditional music recognizable in my playing. The sound of my music
can perhaps be characterized as a slightly studio-enhanced acoustic
soundscape.
The “newness” in my music, then, is not to be found in what could be called
the “competent brokenness” of my electronica contemporaries, or in the
fusing of genres in the current traditional music field. It is to be found,
hopefully, in the fact that a performer playing folk and folk-related music
improvises during a great portion of the performances, in a genre where
people haven´t improvised a lot before. That is, my attempt at renewal lies
within the actual method, rather than in the sonic qualities and sound
(re-)production.
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160.
CONTEXT:
SCANDINAVIAN CONTEMPORARIES (16:46)
(Sound example: “Ploska”, played on nyckelharpa, viola, guitar and
percussion by Väsen)
My project works with very local information sources, and very international
influences in method and sound. This piece is not the place to find my
influences – that´s taken care of in the essays named “Influences”, but I owe
it to my respectable instrument colleagues to show them that I am aware and
appreciative of their work. Guitar and folk music have come together in
Norway and Sweden over the past twenty years. Here are the performers I
am aware of, and I´m limiting myself to one sound example per performer.
A list like this won´t capture all of them, as the guitar is the world´s most
common instrument and the field is developing rapidly.
(Sound example: “Ploska”, played on nyckelharpa, viola and percussion by
Väsen, continued)
Roger Tallroth has primarily become known for his energetic and inventive
rhythmic role in the Swedish trio Väsen. His tuning of the twelve-string
guitar, A-D-A-D-A-D, has resulted in a handful of guitarists imitating his
approach around the world, and he is well known and highly respected
internationally as a musician and as a producer. Though he also performs on
octave mandola, tenor guitar and Swedish bouzouki, his rhythm work is
what has made him justifiably famous, and he therefore works in a less
melody/improvisation-driven mode than I do. I have chosen the track
“Ploska” from the album “Gront” to show his typical playing in Väsen.
(Sound example: “Ploska”, played on nyckelharpa, viola and percussion by
Väsen, continued)
Øystein Sandbukt hails from Sunndalsøra, about three hours southwest of
my hometown Trondheim. He holds a master´s degree in folk music from
the Rauland Academy of folk culture in Norway, and touched upon the
possibilities for improvisation in the folk music field in his thesis. His
approach consists of extracting the chords that the melodies suggest to his
ear, he creates a chord chart, and proceeds to improvise on these chord
changes with as much instinctive influence from traditional music as
possible. That´s where his method ends, however, and I hope to show that I
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have a different way of working. Øystein´s flawless technique, sense of
economy and immersion in the traditional music of the Nordmøre region is
well exemplified by his arrangement of “Grølislåtten”.
(Sound example: “Grølislåtten” played by Øystein Sandbukt on acoustic
guitar)
Tore Bruvoll started out playing blues, and still utilizes techniques and
sounds from American music in his projects. In his duo “Bruvoll /
Halvorsen” he joins up with traditional singer Jon Anders Halvorsen, and
“Svend i Rosengaard” was recently promoted heavily on Norwegian TV.
The dominance of non-Norwegian music in his playing is what sets us apart.
(Sound example: Bruvoll/Halvorsen singing and playing “Svend i
Rosengaard”)
Olle Lindvall, born in 1963, performs Swedish folk tunes alone in a sparse
fashion, concentrating on the melody and little else on his nylon-strung
guitar. My choice of instrument, as well as the greater occurrence of chords
and bass lines alongside the melody in my arrangements are the two main
differences between us. I also rely more on original compositions towards
the end of my project, and Lindvall doesn´t improvise solos on his
epynomous debut record from 2002, where we find the tune “Jemt Olle”.
(Sound example: “Jemt Olle” played by Olle Lindvall on acoustic guitar)
Øyvind Lyslo is a very prominent classical guitarist from Sandane in
Western Norway. He has lent his arranging and playing skills to several
projects in the traditional field, and his duo record “Syngjande Strenger”
(which means singing strings) with hardanger fiddler Arne Sølvberg
received a nomination for a Norwegian “Grammy” (Spellemannsprisen) in
1991. The mighty classical guitar literature doesn´t really concern my
project, be it in finger-based playing techniques or the dynamic
understanding in interpretation. “Raftevoldskruna” is my chosen example
from “Syngjande Strenger”.
(Sound example: Arne Sølvberg and Øyvind Lyslo playing
“Raftevoldskruna” on hardanger fiddle and guitar)
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Annar By is from Elverum in Østerdalen in the south of Norway, and is
trained as a singer and guitarist from the Rauland Academy of folk culture.
His solo debut record “Folk Gitar & Sang” contains old folk songs, religious
numbers, and dance tunes performed instrumentally. His exquisite technique
and tone show his self-professed influence from English folk-rock musicians
such as Richard Thompson. As I don´t sing, and Annar By does, our
expressions will differ a lot from each other, and six-string guitar is his
chosen weapon. An instrumental example from Annar´s record, however, is
“Reinlender etter Adolf Bakke”.
(Sound example: “Reinlender etter Adolf Bakke”, played by Annar By on
acoustic guitar)
Knut Reiersrud
When I talk about my musical projects to people in Norway, I´m often met
with the assumption that I take Knut Reiersrud´s work as a starting point.
Great as my admiration is for the man, it´s not quite true. He is, however, a
seminal figure in Norwegian musical life, and should be mentioned in
respectful terms as someone establishing context for, if not direct influence
on, my work. I was honoured when Nidaros Blues Festival told me he had
accepted an invitation to play a duo concert with me in April of 2008.
Unfortunately, I fell ill on the actual date, but I did manage to arrange some
of his music in preparation.
Reiersrud, approximately ten years my senior, has had an amazing career,
developing resolute skills in electric blues guitar from an early age.
Influenced by Chicago luminaries such as Buddy Guy, he managed to
establish an international name for himself while still in his early twenties,
and he has expanded his knowledge of instruments, playing styles and music
history of semi-modern folk forms throughout his whole life. His first solo
album, “Tramp”, displayed his interest in many fields, Norwegian traditional
music among them. The title tune is a case in point. Much of the same
musical material can, by the way, be found in his composition “Hit me with
your fingerpicks”.
(Sound example: “Tramp” played by Knut Reiersrud on hi-string guitar)
The instrument Reiersrud uses here is called hi-string guitar, and it´s one of
the moves that have made him famous. The idea, used for decades in the
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country and western recording studios in Nashville (for example), is to
replace the bottom four strings of a regular acoustic guitar with treble strings
one octave higher. This simple re-rigging of a household instrument creates
new possibilities for dense chord voicings, and rids the guitarist of bass
frequencies altogether in order to emulate what Andrew Cronshaw calls the
“high, silvery quality” of hardanger fiddle or, more to the point, the
langeleik, a norwegian dulcimer-like contraption. Reiersrud habitually tunes
the hi-string guitar to DADGAD (bottom to top), a fact I was totally
unaware of when I used the same trick for the tune “Floril” on my own
“Unu” album. For the “Tramp” tune, he seems to use a capo (which is a
clamp to change keys without changing fingerings) at the fifth fret, putting
him in the key of G. Iver Kleive plays church organ on this piece as well.
(Sound example: “Tramp” played by Knut Reiersrud on hi-string guitar,
continued)
“Tramp” is an intriguing phenomenon. It´s probably the one piece of music
people think of if you say “Norwegian folk guitar”, yet it has a very
sophisticated structure, with 9/8 rhythms rolling across the 4/4 footstomp,
many different sections that are related but not similar, and bears all the
features of concert music rather than dance accompaniment. After a slow,
rubato introduction that evokes langeleik sounds, the tempo introduced
could probably be called a polka, but Reiersrud´s practices don´t succumb to
genres precisely enough for the groove to be defined as such. It´s just a fast
4/4 rhythm - that puts tremendous technical demands on the performer.
(Sound example: “Tramp” played by Knut Reiersrud and Iver Kleive on histring guitar and organ, continued)
Much as Reiersrud improvises in the rock and blues fields, his approach to
acoustic settings like this seems to be more that of a classical musician: The
agreed-upon arrangement is adhered to, and the few improvisational strains
found here are embellishments of the introduction. As far as I´m aware, the
same practices apply to his other records, and my own approach of
extracting raw material from folk music for improvisational purposes is
consequently an entity of its own, different from Reiersrud´s musical
methods.
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161.
CONTEXT: GEOGRAPHY AND MUSIC (7:03)
(Sound example: “Polsdans etter Karl Alexandersen”, played by Hilmar
Alexandersen and Geir Egil Larsen on fiddle and flute)
My secondary supervisor, Geir Egil Larsen, talks a lot about regional and
local variations in performance practices in the Trøndelag region. He is not
alone in using geographical boundaries within a local area to describe
various hallmarks in Norwegian traditional music. As is the case with many
scholars in this field, he always acknowledges, pronounced or tacit, that
many of the underlying features in “our” music come from outside these
shores, and that international travel and the resulting exchange of music has
a long-standing history. However, his interest in regional differences
between adjoining areas remains, and this is where I notice both my lack of
training in the traditional field from my childhood, as well as a certain shift
in paradigms in the current age.
(Sound example: “Meltaus-Solberg”, played by Frigg)
It is a fair and not very imaginative assumption that the speed at which
musicians influence each other has picked up dramatically over the past
decades as a result of technological, geopolitical and communicative
changes. The difference between the Trøndelag regions internally, for
example, is less of an issue for younger performers today than, for example,
the merging process between Scandinavian and Celtic traditional music. A
relevant case in point (that you just heard) is Larsen´s son Einar Olav,
whose brilliant fiddling can be heard in the Norwegian-Finnish group Frigg.
This band combines Scandinavian and Celtic strands in their original
compositions to an extent that removes them from the role of torch-bearing
keepers of tradition. Another example could be the young Scottish trio Lau,
whose use of time signatures in British Isles music suggests influences from
Balkan music. Nobody I´m aware of have called these bands “HelsinkiVerdalish” or “Edinburghian” – and though my example is deliberately
naïve, it illustrates the point that a lot of modern, folk-based acoustic music
starts out from local traditions and ends up as something entirely different in
the end.
(Sound example: “The Butcher´s Boy, played by Lau)
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Whether or not this generations´ gradual levelling out of musical regional
accents shows the strength of globalization or the loss of one´s sense of
place is something that will probably be debated hotly as long as there are
musicians on this planet. Derogatory audience responses such as,
respectively, “watered-down” or “introvert and old-timey” just show that
the whole debacle comes down to taste more than anything.
Instead, it seems to me that we are once again discussing the difference
between documenter and the documentee. The clichéd notion is that scholars
organize, and musicians jam. The truth, I suppose, lies somewhere in
between, as is so often the case. Neo-conservatism in the shape of strictly
regionally influenced performers will take over the spotlight from allembracing, globalization-friendly players and vice versa in a back-and forth
shift that´s probably been going on since long before computers and planes.
(Sound example: “Finnleken i Brekken”, played by Tron Steffen Westberg
on hardanger fiddle)
That´s Tron Steffen Westberg, a very prominent and repected Røros fiddler
from our own time, and in his 1988 book about Røros fiddler Smed-Jens,
assistant professor Bjørn Aksdal offers the following clear-minded
suggestions concerning the local-universal questions (the translation is
mine):
“To what degree can one describe a tradition as local, and if one can, which
elements determine its local-ness? There has been a certain tendency for
some local circuits to claim a right of origin to particular tunes. A
comparison between the selections in Smed-Jens´ tunebook with similar
books preceding it, and from other regions in Trøndelag, shows that the
content is very much the same. This applies to the particular tunes as well as
to the genres of dance. A widening of the geographical area in this
experiment will yield the same similarity, though to a slightly smaller
degree. Interestingly, such an investigation also shows that many tunes from
Smed-Jens´ repertoire that are still played and held to be old Røros music
often turns out to have its origins elsewhere, sometimes even with a namegiven person of origin. The same holds true for many other Røros tunes as
well.
I believe that the issue of local tradition comes down to performance style,
with an emphasis on rhythmic and especially metric idiosyncrasies in the
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interaction between the music and the dance. We might call this a frame of
tradition that will contain a number of sub-styles, often of a more or less
individual nature.”
(Sound example: “Finnleken i Brekken”, played by Tron Steffen Westberg
on hardanger fiddle, continued)
162.
ADJOINING PROJECTS
(15:02)
As my work has progressed throughout these three years, I have realized the
importance of efforts that have turned out secondary to the final outcome. In
any other research discipline, finding out what “doesn´t work” is sometimes
as important as finding out what “does work”. Of course, these decisions are
highly subjective and the result of taste more than anything else – hence the
quotation marks - but giving a brief insight into ensembles and ideas that
I´ve decided not to include in the final presentation may shed some light on
why I sound the way I do at the end of the project. Some of the
collaborations will survive healthily in other arenas, but they´ve all been
either discontinued or put on hold for the final part of my scholarship period.
I am humble, grateful, and hopefully in concord with these excellent
musicians´ individual ambitions both where they coincided with my own, as
well as where we parted ways aesthetically for this leg of the journey.
(1) Quintus
(Sound example: “Gåbdesbakhte”, played by Quintus and me)
Employed in state-funded part-time positions in Nord-Trøndelag, this group
of brass players is augmented by a drummer. Since starting out in
conventional jazz-and-a-bit-of-classical genres, they have expanded their
ambitions to include commissioned works by many writers, and their special
twist over the past decade has been modal arrangements and improvisations
connected to the joik music from the sámi population in Trøndelag and
northern Norway. Composer and musician Frode Fjellheim has been
involved in workshopping and developing ideas, and the band is a regular
attraction on the stages wherever the mighty marching band movement in
Norway gather up for festivals. Since my first record from 2003 included
some New Orleans-inspired brass textures in Norwegian music, we decided
that their geographical ties with Nord-Trøndelag warranted a collaboration. I
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joined them for a handful of gigs in 2007-08, where I tried to join them on
their orchestrations of joik tunes, and they helped me realize the visions from
my first record and beyond. The concerts were a lot of fun and highly
educational for me. This is the traditional joik tune “Gåbdesbakhte”,
arranged by Frode Fjellheim:
(Listening example: “Gåbdesbakhte”, played by Quintus and me, continued)
The reasons for us not playing together at the moment are twofold, and
perfectly consentual: First, the band feels that their ambitions lie in
exploring more modern tonalities than I prefer, and I predict them moving
into a more contemporary art-music direction than my experiments with
them contained. Second, I´ve come to the realization that I seek a sound
populated by fewer musicians, not more, because the harmonic information
present in my own approach to the guitar bouzouki doesn´t need doubling. If
anything, my influences lead me to gradually weeding out harmony, rather
than adding it in.
(2) Herskedal/Michelsen/Aase
(Sound example: “Os”, played on guitar bouzouki, tuba and clarinet by me,
Daniel Herskedal and Morten Michelsen)
In the spring of 2007 I undertook a series of rehearsals in Trondheim and
Copenhagen with tubaist Daniel Herskedal and clarinetist Morten
Michelsen. Our mutual vision was to see if we could develop some modern,
Norwegian-sounding music in an intimate, non-percussive setting, and we
all brought original and traditional material to the table. The main problem,
in my ears, seemed to be that none of the music we put together had been
purpose-built for this band. I think, for example, that my tune “Os”, in an
early form, shows that the melody line is constructed on the premise that
some percussive instrument is present, so rather than creating space the
music “stops” from time to time. The lament “Bruregråten” (the second time
I came across it in my project, interestingly) holds some promise, but I think
the eventual future for this trio – and I think there might be one – depends on
purpose-composed tunes where we utilize, say, Daniel´s great palette of tuba
sounds outside the melodic tone, or Morten´s impressive technical command
of the high register on the clarinet, partly obtained from his background in
klezmer music. As a result of these limitations in preparing the concept, the
fast tunes suffer from the absence of a drummer, the slow ones seem to
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yearn for the harmonic anchoring of a keyboard instrument – or a more
confident presence on my part. I stuck to the dogma of playing mostly guitar
bouzouki, but listening back I can tell I didn´t have enough command of my
instrument by a long shot at the time of the rehearsals.
(Sound example: “Os”, played on guitar bouzouki, tuba and clarinet by me,
Daniel Herskedal and Morten Michelsen, continued)
(3) Eide / Tweed / Aase
(Sound example: “Horse Called Elvis”, played on hardanger fiddle,
accordeon and guitar by Sturla Eide, Karen Tweed and me)
Sturla Eide is one of my informants in this project, and his skills on regular
and hardanger fiddles have taught me a lot about traditional music. For a
few years he has collaborated with English accordeonist Karen Tweed, and
during two short tours in 2007 and 2008 we conducted some rudimentary
recording sessions where I tried to fit in. Though sincere in my ambitions for
this trio, I quickly concluded that my role here needs to be that of a
conventional guitar player, sticking to agreed arrangements that don´t collide
too much with the accordeon, such as in Karen´s tune “Horse Called Elvis”
(that you just heard). Actually, these two musicians seem to free up a lot of
more experimental space when I´m not involved, and I have encouraged
them to look into their duo format more than this lineup. The sonorities of
accordeon and hardanger fiddle take on a more spontaneous and maybe
impressionist streak when the sound of guitar strings don´t tie them down
rhythmically, and we seem to end up with more conventional choices from
either the Norwegian or the Celtic backgrounds we constitute. An organic
mix of the two would be more exciting – so far the following excerpt from
Karen´s tune “String And Tennisballs” points us in what I think is a good
direction. I play Hawaiian Weissenborn guitar here, and the guitar bouzouki
has fallen by the wayside for this band – possibly because double-coursed
guitar instruments are very common in the British Isles and Celtic traditional
music forms, and I seek some different textures for Karen´s accordeon.
(Sound example: “String And Tennisballs”, played on fiddle, accordeon and
Weissenborn guitar by Sturla Eide, Karen Tweed and me)
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(4) Attempted fusions
(Sound example: “Deilig Er Jorden” sung by Elisabeth Moberg and played
on synthesizer and guitar bouzouki by Morten Huuse and me)
From the very start of this project, I attempted to move out of my comfort
zone and started using the fifth-tuned guitar bouzouki in many settings
before I actually had any overview of the fretboard. This board-tape
recording of the Christmas hymn “Deilig Er Jorden” (which means “The
Earth Is Beautiful”, loosely translated) with singer Elisabeth Moberg from
December of 2007 is a good example. In an attempt to find a new angle on a
familiar tune, the quartet of musicians in a once-a-year pop concert utilized
broad synthesizer drones, rubato time perception, and the aid of sound
technician Sturla Samuelsen to create a dramatic reading more relevant to
our own geopolitical times. I tried to use some material I had developed at
this early stage, and in hindsight find my effort clumsy, but with promise.
(Sound example: “Deilig Er Jorden” sung by Elisabeth Moberg and played
on synthesizer and guitar bouzouki by Morten Huuse and me, continued)
163.
REFLECTION:
IMPROVISATIONS, APRIL 2009 (11:34)
Following the “fumbling exercises” I´ve demonstrated earlier, it is now time
to bring my ensemble back together and start trying to implement my ideas.
After a few discussions with my musicians, we decided to strip down the
percussive role to a cyclical function rather than the reactive drumkit
aesthetic from jazz. We rehearsed some new pieces of mine and revisited
some old ones. For this soundclip, I´ve only included some excerpts from
my own improvisations – a fuller impression of the tunes will be left for the
final CD.
Listening to these very simple practice recordings, I conclude that I´m well
underway in the process of establishing a phrase repertoire from the sources
I´ve had access to, but that my instinctive choices are too few so far – I keep
landing on the same “licks”, as the listener may perceive. I seem to be on the
brink of establishing a musical thumbprint, but I need more material in my
solos to keep myself interested when listening back. My suggested strategy
for shooting my way out of this corner is to practice the “fumbling
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exercises” and improvisations next to each other on a daily basis for the next
weeks, thus setting the solos apart from each other by establishing separate
memory instincts for each solo.
(Sound example: band rehearsal recordings of improvisations)
164.
CONCLUSIONS AND FURTHER IDEAS (11:18)
(Sound example: Short improvisation in Cm)
If your work has the word “research” attached to it in some way, it means
you´re trying to develop strategies in uncharted territory. I have consistently
tried to show development instead of perfection. An effort like this will
probably change the way I´ll hear music in the future, so these musings will
all have tentative question marks behind them.
I regret that getting to know the fretboard in fifths tuning was a lot harder
than I expected, and has taken up some of the time that should have been
used for improvisation training. My main supervisor warned me about this,
but I chose to stay with the idea of the guitar bouzouki.
On the plus side, I feel that having spent this time trying to imitate
instruments and playing styles that are not part of my background, I´ve
added something to a musical approach that remains guitaristic. Ending up
sounding exactly like a fiddler or a flute player is not only impossible, it´s in
my opinion pointless.
And while we´re on the subject of preferences: some of the achievements in
the sections called “Melodic Expansions” seem not to meet my musical
taste. I tend to like music that stays quite basic in the tonal area, but maybe
my ear will warm to these new tonalities with time. Maybe modal ideas from
Arabic music used on Norwegian material would have suited me better as an
organizing principle than jazz-derived expansions
(Sound example: short improvisation in Cm, continued)
Perhaps the rhythmic foundations I used to accompany my exercises should
have been taken from traditional music (recordings of feet in dancing,
bowstrokes on open fiddle strings, etc) rather than the programmed “pop”
beats you´ve been hearing. Although Carl Haakon Waadeland´s work in my
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trio has helped me internalize Norwegian drum rhythms, I still feel I´ve
cheated myself out of a chance to saturate the rhythmic aspect of my playing
with “Norwegianness”. Perhaps my accompaniments should have sounded
more like this?:
(Sound example: Manipulated halling rhythm from Sturla Eide´s
bowstrokes)
Many of my double-stop phrases try to make fretted drones work alongside
phrases with open-stringed drones. The phrases with open-stringed drones
sound more “traditional” to my ears, probably because the use of open
strings is an old projection trick from fiddlers playing for dances.
(Sound example: Phrase from “Gropen” in fretted-strings only and openstringed version)
Two of the compositions in the final presentation, "Dyss" and "Tsjugga", are
performed without improvised solos. They were, however, extracted from
improvisations !that were not recorded - I think the experimental process
leading up to fixed compositions also counts as a kind of improvisation.!This
doesn´t have to be a philosophical problem, as I think David Sylvian shows
in his collaboration with guitarist Derek Bailey on the record “Blemish”:
Sylvian meticulously created his melody lines on top of Bailey´s free guitar
improvisations, and came out with what will probably be called
compositions.
(Sound example: David Sylvian and Derek Bailey playing “She Is Not”,
voice and guitar)
Arnt Rian and I are currently collaborating on creating a Hardanger
Mandola, tuned one fifth up from the guitar bouzouki, to get closer to the
timbre of hardanger fiddle. Most of this project has taken place in a darker
timbral territory, and this instrument may help adding what Andrew
Cronshaw calls the “high, silvery quality” of the hardanger fiddle. Our
construction ideas are indebted to the Hardingmandolin built by
luthier/musician Harald Hougaard from Moss in Norway.
(Sound example: Pat Metheny playing guitar synthesizer on “Barcarole”)
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In the reference list, you´ll find a web article about Pat Metheny´s use of
guitar synthesizers, where he talks about his need to answer, but not imitate,
qualities from wind instruments like trumpet. I abandoned an early idea
about cross-sampling bukkhorn and Meråkerklarinett: The idea was to have
the reworked sound available via midi as a solo-sound additive to my
plucked-string, acoustic sound. Maybe I´ll return to it, but I find myself
becoming fonder of acoustic sounds each passing day.
Most importantly: This has been meaningful and fun. Though the matrix-like
presentation here can make my work life over the past three years seem very
rigorous and lifeless, the truth is that I think I´ve developed something that
will be of great use to me in my musical future, and I´m already receiving
favourable responses from audiences that instinctively detect something they
haven´t heard before.
I´ll leave you with a tune I´ve learned from Geir Egil Larsen, but that I
haven´t used for improvisational purposes: this is my arrangement of
“Senpolska etter Kristina Moberg”.
(Sound example: Me playing “Senpolska etter Kristina Moberg”)
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163
164
APPENDIX 1:
Communication in the course of the project
This overview includes concerts and other appearances where I have used
work-in-progress material. It also includes seminars, lectures, and
interviews. Unless otherwise noted, all phone numbers are Norwegian
(prefix + 47).
October 18th, 2006: Duo performance with bassist Jon Rune Strøm at
Dokkhuset in Trondheim during a meeting of principals for the Norwegian
music conservatories.
Reference: Erik Hagtun, NTNU, 73 59 65 00
October 29th, 2006: Performance at “Guitar Day” at Ringve Museum of
Music History, Trondheim.
Reference: Tone Fegran, 97 10 89 24
November 2006: Revision and printing of the guitar book “Unu” as a
prestudy for notation in the project. No interest from publishers, but my
private edition has been spread in the local area through sales at concerts and
music shops.
November 9th, 2006: Two solo concerts at Bankstua, Orkanger, at the request
of Orkdal municipality
Reference: Sturla Eide, 41 30 17 78
November 11th, 2006: Solo concert, Stiklestad National Center of Culture.
November 17th, 2006: Concert with “Quintus”, Hilmar Alexandersen
Festival, Steinkjer.
Reference, Quintus: Bjørn Erik Heggli, 99 28 14 35
November 20-24th, 2006: Week of performances of commissioned work
“Slip” at Dokkhuset, Trondheim, at the request of Trondheim Jazzforum and
Midtnorsk Jazzsenter. Recording of concert DVD, “Andreas Aase Live At
Dokkhuset”, to show status at the beginning of the project, sent out to jazz
clubs in the region for promotional purposes.
Reference: Rune Holme, 95 78 59 23
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November 24th, 2006: Recording and web posting of “Heling” video to
document approach at the beginning of the project (see reference list).
December 17th, 2006: Concert with the ensemble “Kvilestein”, Strindheim
Church, Trondheim.
Reference, Kvilestein: Knut Størdal, 97 68 39 42
January 15th, 2007: Club gig with Andreas Aase Liga at Credo, Trondheim.
Reference, Credo: Tor Schjølberg, 93 20 07 15
January 18th, 2007: Solo performance for the library employees´ union,
Trondheim.
Reference: Siri Sæther, 92 64 84 79
February 14th, 2007: Lecture for employees at Department of Music, NTNU.
Reference: Wenche Waagen, tlf. 91 89 75 14
March 9th, 2007: Club gig with Quintus, Tindved Kulturhage, Verdal.
March 17th and 18th, 2007: Rehearsal and concert with mixed choir
“Chorus”, Byneset Gamle Kirke, Trondheim.
Reference, Chorus: Conductor Randi Lundemo, 95 97 08 62
March 24th-25th, 2007: Weekend workshop for Strinda Strykeorkester
(children´s-and youth orchestra in Trondheim) with Sturla Eide (fiddle)
Reference: Håkan Henriksen, 41 41 94 92
April 28th-29th, 2007: Rehearsals and concert with Sturla Eide (fiddle) and
mixed choir Cantilena, Orkdal.
Reference, Cantilena: Conductor Bjørn Borge, 91 78 06 52
May 13th, 2007: Project presentation for participants at Department of Music
(NTNU)´s program “Unge Talenter” (“Young Talents”)
Reference: Else Bø, 48 22 55 33
June 1st, 2007: Solo concert, Gamle Orre Kirke, Jæren.
Reference, Klepp Municipality: Gunnar Tønnesen, 93 49 37 60
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June 2nd, 2007: Solo performance, Trondheim Jazz Festival, Dokkhuset,
Trondheim.
Reference, Trondheim Jazz Festival: Ernst Wiggo Sandbakk, 99 45 29 41
June 7th, 2007: Solo concert, Kafé Filter, Trondheim
Reference: Ketil Hustad, 90 19 89 02
June 16th, 2007: Concert with Quintus, Folldal
July 27th, 2007: Concert with Andreas Aase Liga, Olavsfestdagene,
Trondheim
Reference, Olavsfestdagene: Erling Johansen, 91 74 92 88
August 17-18th , 2007: Performances with Sturla Eide (fiddle) and student
ensemble during FolkWorks Summer School, Durham, England.
Reference: The Sage Gateshead, 01 91 443 4661
August 19th, 2007: Solo performance at Ringve Museum of Music History,
Trondheim
Reference: Torbjørn Selven, 45 42 75 85
August 2007: Recording and web-posting of video showing use of guitar
bouzouki in “Halling etter Lars Voldøyhaug” (see reference list)
September 4th, 2007: Solo performance at Ringve Museum of Music History,
Trondheim
14. September 2007: Live performance at Norwegian Public Radio (NRK)
with Sturla Eide (fiddle) and Ronny Kjøsen (accordeon)
Reference: Nils Åge Nonstad, 90 15 85 95
September 17th-21st, 2007: Various trio concerts with Sturla Eide (fiddle)
and Ronny Kjøsen (accordeon)
1. Oktober 2007: Performance at “Streetlight”- a charity to help Filipino
streetkids. Frimurerlogen, Trondheim.
Reference: Siri Gjære, 41 22 89 19
167
October 2nd, 2007: Workshop at Gauldal Folkehøgskole, Melhus.
Reference: Jan Eivind Tønnesen, 95 28 58 20
November 8th, 2007: Club gig with Quintus, Hilmar Alexandersen Festival,
“Mitt Hjem”, Steinkjer.
Reference: Geir Egil Larsen, 90 67 10 38
November 15th, 2007: Communal gig for volounteers, Byåsen, Trondheim
Reference: Astrid, Byåsen Frivillighetssentral, 477 05 829
December 6th, 2007: Gig with Sturla Eide (fiddle), Hitra.
Reference: Kirsten Mellemsæter, 91 73 96 92
December 9th, 2007: Christmas concert with Heidi Skjerve (vocals), Sturla
Eide (fiddle) and mixed choir Cantilena, Orkdal
Reference, Cantilena: Conductor Bjørn Borge, 91 78 06 52
December 17th-20th, 2007: Christmas concerts with various artists, Trøndelag
February 2nd, 2008: Performance at research fellow Øyvind Brandsegg´s
final presentation, NTNU
Reference: Carl Haakon Waadeland, 97 50 83 30
February 9th, 2008: Performance at Midtvintersdansen, Verdal.
Reference: Geir Egil Larsen, 90 67 10 38
Winter 2008: 5 workshops for Søndre Trondhiems Spildemandslag with
Sturla Eide (fiddle).
Reference: Arild Hoksnes, 91 76 77 76
April 15th, 2008: Club gig at Credo, Trondheim with Sturla Eide (fiddle) and
Ronny Kjøsen (accordeon).
Reference: Tor Schjølberg, 93 20 07 15
May 14th, 2008: Concert with Andreas Aase Liga, Levanger Jazzklubb.
Reference: Ørjan Kines [email protected]
31. Mai 2008: Club gig, Fannrem, with Karen Tweed (accordeon) and
Sturla Eide (fiddle)
168
June 4th, 2008: Project presentation, “Itovation” – interdisciplinary PhD
seminar at NTNU.
Reference: Letizia Jaccheri 73 59 65 00
June 7th, 2008: Solo performance at Trondheim Jazz Festival.
Reference: Ernst Wiggo Sandbakk, 99 45 29 41
July 18th, 2008: Solo concert, “Klas Bøle-stemnet”, Flatanger.
Reference: Rune Skogstad, 46 13 02 89
July 19th, 2008: “Fra Elise” – memorial concert for religious singer Elise
Flaten, Oppdal. Christin Hoff (vocals), Ingebrigt Håker Flaten (bass), and
Åsmund Flaten (piano/organ)
Reference: Åsmund Flaten, 92 65 06 62
July 24th, 2008: Gig at “Bussekaill-festivalen”, Hitra, with Sturla Eide
(fiddle).
Reference: Bjørn Fjeldvær, 94 83 65 80
September 2nd, 2008: Workshop at Gauldal Folkehøgskole (Trøndertun).
Reference: Jan Eivind Tønnesen, 95 28 58 20
September 4th, 2008: Workshop at Kulturskoledagene, Rica Hell Conference
Hotel.
Reference: Bård Hestnes, Norsk Musikkskoleråd, 91 52 00 01
September 4th, 2008: Interview and live performance, Norwegian Public
Radio (NRK), at Kulturskoledagene, Rica Hell Conference Hotel.
September 19th: 2008: Gig at Norsk Radiomuseum, Selbu, with Sturla Eide
(fiddle) and Ronny Kjøsen (accordeon).
Reference: Norsk Radiomuseum, 91 25 32 61
September 26th, 2008: Trio performance with research fellows Michael Duch
(bass) and Tone Åse (electronic vocals) in conjunction with ultrasound
equipment at Blæst, Trondheim.
Reference, NTNU: Anne Steenstrup Duch, 90 09 62 95
September 27th, 2008: Solo concert at Teatercaféen, Trøndelag Teater
Reference, Trøndelag Teater: Ivar Gafseth, 91 72 27 02
169
October 2nd, 2008: Solo performance at Ringve Museum of Music History.
October 17th, 2008: Solo performance at diploma ceremony, Department of
Architecture, NTNU.
Reference: Fredrik Shetelig (Dean), 91 56 71 87
October 23rd, 2008: Performance in Nidaros Cathedral, Trondheim, of “I
Förväntan och Fröjd”, Swedish mass based on traditional music, with Randi
Flaaøien Lundemo (vocals), Sturla Eide (fiddle) and two choirs.
Reference: Randi Flaaøien Lundemo, 95 97 08 62
November 12th, 2008: Tentative presentation at interdisciplinary course in
pedagogy, NTNU
Reference: PPLU, NTNU /Geir Halland, 73 59 65 00
November 14th, 2008: Solo performance in Vår Frue Kirke, Trondheim.
Reference: Kirkens Bymisjon, Trondheim
November 19th, 2008: Solo performance at Ringve Museum of Music
History.
November 22nd, 2008: Trio performance in Kopperå Kappell with Heidi
Skjerve (vocals) and Sturla Eide (fiddle).
Reference: Meråker Kommune
November 26th, 2008: Choir concert with Byneset Songlag Sturla Eide,
Gamle Byneset Kirke.
Reference: Byneset Songlag / Magne Bjørkøy
November 27th, 2008: Duo performance at book launch for De Kongelige
Norske Videnskabers Selskab, Trondheim, with Tormod Dalen, cello.
Arr. DKNVS.
December 5th, 2008: Solo performance at Ringve Museum of Music
History.
170
December 9th, 2008: Solo performance in Lademoen Kirke, Trondheim,
celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Human Rights
Reference: Kent Hirsch, 97 98 81 48
March 29th, 2009: Performance in Orkdal Kirke, of “I Förväntan och Fröjd”,
Swedish mass based on traditional music, with Randi Flaaøien Lundemo
(vocals), Sturla Eide (fiddle) and two choirs.
Reference: Randi Flaaøien Lundemo, 95 97 08 62
May 16th, 2009: Solo performance at Ringve Museum of Music History.
May 21st, 2009: Solo performance at Ringve Museum of Music History.
June 2nd-12th, 2009: CD recording
June 29-30th, 2009: “Nu Nattens Mørk Forsvinner”, concert project
interpreting the hymns of Nils Olsen Svee, Stordal Rosekyrkje. With Sondre
Bratland, Randi Flaaøien Lundemo et.al.
Reference: Odd-Johan Overøye, 95 08 65 80
July 2nd-5th, 2009: Various gigs at Førde Internasjonale Folkemusikkfestival
with Sturla Eide (fiddle) and Ronny Kjøsen (accordeon)
August 14th: Solo performance at teacher´s recital, NTNU
August 21st, 2009: Solo performance at NTNU
Reference: Torlaug Løkensgard Hoel, 73 59 19 86
September 2-5th, 2009: Workshops and concerts in duo with Bob Brozman at
“Blues in Hell” festival.
Reference: Kjell Inge Brovoll, 95 22 46 77
October 3rd, 2009: Final artistic presentation, Dokkhuset, Trondheim.
171
APPENDIX 2:
Networking
- Video postings
YouTube is a great tool to get in touch with listeners and colleagues. The
two videos I have posted, “Heling” and “Halling” (pun intended) have
gathered up many positive responses, although the latter disappeared for a
while for unknown technical reasons, and the new HD version hasn´t had
time to generate that much interest yet.
- New York Guitar Festival, January 2007
I attended two concerts at this festival and got to see many of my heroes;
Kelly Joe Phelps, Harry Manx and John Leventhal were among many who
recreated Bob Dylan´s “Free Trade Hall” concert, replicating the setlist but
interpreting the songs freely. A tribute to Hank Williams´ music a few days
later was equally impressive in lineup. Both events suffered from poor sound
quality.
I had dinner with curator David Spelman, and we´ve kept in touch. A
tentative invitation for me to play the club “Barbés” in Brooklyn during the
2010 festival is being discussed, but the financial crisis has hit the festival
hard and nothing is defined at the moment.
- FolkWorks Summer School, August 2007
A week-long workshop in Durham, England, with some leading musicians
in European traditional music on the staff. I taught guitar, and got to meet
and play with my fellow teachers Nancy Kerr, James Fagan, Karen Tweed,
Ian Stephenson and many others.
- Rio de Janeiro, January 2009
The maxixe polka rhythm underpinning the instrumental choro music in
Brazil made me wonder if a deep dive into the city and its music venues
could shed some new light on my own work. Playing choros on fifths-tuned
bandolim has been a good way to strengthen my fretboard understanding of
172
the guitar bouzouki, but I´ll content myself with being an interpreter of
Brazilian music. I wrote an essay about the trip, and decided not to use it for
reasons of lacking relevance – but the two instruments I bought may find
their way into my Norwegian-tinged playing eventually. I made some good
contacts on Rio´s choro scene, based around the jam club Bip Bip in
Copacabana.
- Playing live
I refer you back to the list of concerts and events involving other people –
they all constitute the best networking opportunities I can think of and I´m
fortunate to have developed a sizeable list of contacts that will hopefully
keep calling.
173
APPENDIX 3:
References
Books and other literature:
Aksdal, Bjørn and
Sven Nyhus (ed.):
“Fanitullen – innføring i norsk og samisk folkemusikk”
Universitetsforlaget, 1993
Aksdal, Bjørn:
“Fosentonar – musikktradisjoner i kystmiljø”
Fosen historielag, 1988
Aksdal, Bjørn:
“Spelemann og smed – Smed-Jens fra Røros og hans
notebok”
Tapir forlag, 1988
Alterhaug, Bjørn:
“Improvisation on a triple theme: Creativity, jazz
improvisation and communication” (article)
Studio Musicologica Norvegica, vol. 30 2004 597-118
Bjørken, Ove:
“Slåtter fra Innherred, etter Ole M. Bjørkens samlinger”
Private edition
Dybo, Tor:
“Jan Garbarek – det åpne roms estetikk”
Pax forlag, 1996
Larsen, Geir Egil:
“Tonar for Tussefløyte”
Norsk Musikkforlag, 1974
Ledang, Ola Kai:
“Instrument – Player – Music. On the Norwegian Langleik”
Studia Instrumentorum Musicae Popularis 3: 107-118, p.
273-274
Nettl, Bruno and
Melinda Russell
(ed.):
Nord-Trøndelag
Historielag:
“In the course of performance – Studies in the world of
musical improvisation”
University of Chicago Press, 1998
Årbok 1995
174
Nyhus, Sven:
“Hilmar Alexandersen – spelmannen og slåttene”
BUL Steinkjer, 2003
Rasmussen, Bjørn: “Kunst er viten – betraktninger omkring kunnskapssyn og
samordningen i høyere utdanning”
Uniped 200528 (1) p. 33-39
Roemke, Ville:
“På spelmansfärd med Lapp-Nils”
Jämtlands Läns Museums Förlag, 1994
Russell, George:
“Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization”
Concept Publishing, 1959
Russell, Ross:
“Bird Lives: High Life and Hard Times of Charlie Yardbird
Parker”
Quartet Books, 1976
Sandbukt,
Øystein:
"Improvisasjon i tradisjon" (master thesis at Telemark
høgskole for folkekultur). Web-posted PDF document.
Sohlmans
Lexikon:
Steinsholt, Kjetil
and Henning
Sommerro (ed.):
Veloso, Caetano:
“Improvisation” (article)
Waadeland, Carl
Haakon:
“Trommeslåtter: en trommelagers skattekiste: en
presentasjon og videreføring av trommeslåtter fra Johannes
Sundvors samlinger”
Tima forlag, 1992
Walser, Robert:
“Out of notes: Signification, interpretation, and the problem
of Miles Davis” (article)
“Improvisasjon – kunsten å sette seg selv på spill”
N.W. Damm & Sønn, 2006
“Tropical Truth – a Story of Music and Revolution in
Brazil”
Companhia das Letras, 1997 / Bloomsbury, 2003
175
DVD and Video:
Alexandersen,
Hilmar:
“Fela er livet”
NRK Trøndelag, 70th birthday tribute TV program
Bensusan, Pierre:
“Pierre Bensusan in concert”
Vestapol / Rounder, 2004
Brozman, Bob:
“Live in Germany”
Ruf, 2006
Jarrett, Keith:
“Tokyo Solo”
ECM DVD 9873186
Jarrett, Keith:
“The Art of Improvisation”
EuroArts 2054119
Kaurismäki, Mika: “Brasileirinho”
Dogwoof Pictures, 2004
Lúcia, Paco de:
“Paco de Lúcia and Group”
TDK UK, 2004
Lúcia, Paco de:
“Light and Shade – a Portrait”
Arthaus, 1994 / 2001
Shankar, Ravi:
“Pandit Ravi Shankar – A Man And His Music”
Immortal 1986 / 2002
Simpson, Martin:
“Sound Techniques – Guitar Maestros Series”
Sound Techniques, 2006
176
Websites and podcasts:
Aase, Andreas:
Web-posted video documenting use of guitar bouzouki on
“Halling etter Lars Voldøyhaug”
August 16th, 2009, 11:00 am
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCfSun1mBNo
Aase, Andreas:
Web-posted video documenting approach at the beginning of
the project: “Heling” (own tune)
August 16th, 2009, 11:00 am
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AQZyDlZ4KI
Bair, Jeff:
Cyclic Patterns in John Coltrane´s melodic vocabulary as
influenced by
Nicolas Slominsky´s thesaurus of scales and melodic
patterns:
An analysis of selected improvisations
May 19th, 2009, 1 pm
http://digital.library.unt.edu/permalink/meta-dc-4348:1
Bruvoll, Tore:
www.myspace.com/torebruvoll
Cambridge
University Press:
Excerpt from “The Invention of “Folk Music” and “Art
Music” by
Matthew Gelbart.
February 6th, 2009, 7:30 am
http://www.cambridge.org/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=978
0521863032&ss=exc
Carthy, Martin
and Eliza Carthy:
“The Wife of Usher´s Well”. English trad song that shows
liberal use of intervals,
in this case lowered and regular sixth, which is found for
example in
“Reinlender etter Lapp-Nils og Harald Gillan”
August 28th, 2007, 11 am
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbdTHqlZMZI
177
Eno, Brian:
Wikipedia article, segment where Eno discusses creating
start-up sounds for Microsoft –
relates to reductionist practices in contemporary Norwegian
music.
August 12th, 2009, 6:30 pm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Eno#The_Microsoft_Sou
nd
Frisell, Bill:
Interview conducted by Richard Seven in the Seattle Times,
August 12, 2009, 4:30 pm
http://www.billfrisell.com/press/frisell/seattletimes.html
Hougaard,
Harald:
Website displaying Hougaard´s instruments, generating the
idea for building the
harding mandola.
August 11th, 2009, 8:45 am
www.myspace.com/hougaardguitars
Kyrkjehola
Kulturbeite:
Website announcing concert with Sondre Bratland, Randi
Flaaøien Lundemo et al.
August 15th, 2009, 9:53 pm
http://www.kyrkjehola.no/index.php/kyrkjehola_kulturbeite/
program_2009/nu_nattens_moerk_forsvinder
Lyslo, Øyvind:
Web-published soundbites
February 23rd, 2007, 11am
http://home.online.no/~lyslo/
McLaughlin,
John:
”When blue turns gold”
January 9th, 2007, 2 pm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBF_E1YfGvo
Metheny, Pat:
“Interview with Roland GR user Pat Metheny”
February 2nd, 2007, 4pm
http://www.joness.com/gr300/metheny.htm
Metheny, Pat:
“About the Music”
Podcast on I-tunes discussing remastering of Metheny´s
catalogue
178
Möller, Ale:
Interview conducted by Cliff Furnald on the Rootsworld web
site, 1997
February 2nd, 2008, 3 pm
http://www.rootsworld.com/rw/feature/moller2.html
Näslin, R:
“Lapp-Nils – en sägenomspunnen spelman från Jämtland”
February 12th, 2007, 11 am
http://hem.passagen.se/spelman/spelmanslag/lappnils.htm
Opsahl, Carl
Petter:
Website containing lecture notes about Norwegian jazz
performers and their
interest in traditional music.
August 12th, 2009, 5:01 pm
http://www.carlpetter.com/texts/jazznorskfolk.htm
Reiersrud, Knut
and Iver Kleive:
Live version of “Tramp”
November 18th, 2008, 10 pm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eB9OazhIVKA!
Sandbukt,
Øystein:
Home page for guitarist Øystein Sandbukt
August 19th, 2009, 11:15 am
www.myspace.com/oysteinsandbukt
Shankar, Ravi:
Home page with a section dedicated to general information
about Indian music
August 19th, 2009, 11:15 am
http://www.ravishankar.org/indian_music.html
Sobell, Stefan
Home page for guitar builder Stefan Sobell, inspiration for
the construction of the
Rian guitar bouzouki.
February 27th, 2007, 8pm
http://www.sobellinstruments.com/
179
CD:
Alexandersen,
Hilmar:
“Hjartespel”
Buen Kulturverkstad, 1994
Amigo, Vicente:
“Poeta”
CBS / Sony, 1997
Amigo, Vicente:
“Vivencias Imaginadas”
Sony, 1995
Armstrong, Louis:
“Original Columbia Masters – The Best Of Louis
Armstrong
Columbia, 1926-27 / MCA, 2008
Arnesen, Dag:
“Norwegian Song”
Resonant Music, 2007
Bandolim, Jacob
do:
“Jacob do Bandolim In Memoriam”
BMG Ariola, 1996
Bensusan, Pierre:
“Intuite”
DADGAD, 2001
Berg, Kirsten
Bråten, Solo
Cissokho,
Bjørgulv Straume
and Kouame
Sereba:
“Frå Senegal til Setesdal”
Grappa, 1997
Boine, Mari:
“It Ain´t Necessarily Evil”
Lean, 2008
Brahem, Anouar
“Le Voyage de Sahar”
ECM, 2006
Brahem, Anouar:
“Astrakhan Café”
ECM, 2000
180
Buen, Knut:
“Spelemannsprøva”
Buen Kulturverkstad, 2001
By, Annar:
“Folk Gitar & Sang”
NordicWorld, 2006
Coltrane, John:
“Jupiter Variation”
GRP / Universal, 1967, MCA 1987
Cooder, Ry:
“River Rescue – The Very Best Of”
WEA, 1993
Davis, Miles:
“Star People”
Sony, 1983
Davis, Miles:
“You´re Under Arrest”
Sony, 1985
Davis, Miles:
“We Want Miles (Live)”
Sony, 1981
Egeland, Ånon
and Per
Midtstigen:
“I Heitaste Slåtten”
Grappa, 2000
Frifot:
“Frifot”
ECM, 1998
Frigg:
“Frigg”
Independent, 2002
Frigg:
“Live”
FriggCD, 2006
Frisell, Bill:
“Nashville”
Nonesuch, 1997
Frisell, Bill:
“The Willies”
Nonesuch / Warner, 2002
181
Garbarek, Jan w.
Bobo Stenson
Quartet:
“Dansere”
ECM, 1976
Garbarek, Jan w.
“Eventyr”
Nana Vasconcelos ECM, 1981
and John
Abercrombie:
Garbarek, Jan:
“Triptykon”
ECM, 1973
Garbarek, Jan:
“In Praise of Dreams”
ECM, 2004
Garbarek, Jan:
“The Visible World”
ECM, 1996
Garnås, Agnes
Buen w. Jan
Garbarek:
“Rosensfole”
Kirkelig Kulturverksted, 1989
Gåte:
“Liva” (Live)
Warner, 2006
Gismonti,
Egberto:
“Zigzag”
ECM, 1995
Glåmos
Spelemannslag:
“Gamle Dansar frå Rørostraktene”
Talik, 2009
Haden, Charlie w.
Pat Metheny:
“Beyond the Missouri Sky”
Universal, 2006
Halvorsen, Jon
Anders and Tore
Bruvoll:
“Nattsang”
Heilo, 2004
182
Hayes, Martin and “The Lonesome Touch”
Dennis Cahill:
Green Linnet, 1997
Hayes, Martin and “Live in Seattle”
Dennis Cahill:
Green Linnet, 1999
Hayes, Martin and “Welcome Back Here Again”
Dennis Cahill:
Green Linnet, 2008
Hedges, Michael:
“Taproot”
Windham Hill, 1990
Henriksen, Arve:
“Strjon”
Rune Grammofon, 2007
Hulbækmo, Tone:
“Svevende Jord”
Grappa, 1986
Kaiser, Henry and
David Lindley:
“The Sweet Sunny North”
Shanachie, 1994
Keaggy, Phil:
“Way Back Home”
Sparrow, 1994
Keita, Salif:
“Mouffou”
Decca, 2002
Koité, Habib:
“Afriki”
Contre Jour, 2007
Kottke, Leo:
“6 and 12-string Guitar”
Takoma, 1969
Lau:
“Lightweights and Gentlemen”
Reveal Records, 2007
Lien, Annbjørg:
“Baba Yaga”
Grappa, 1999
183
Lindley, David
and Hani Naser:
“Live in Tokyo”
Pleemhead, 1994
Lindley, David
and Hani Naser:
“Playing even better”
Pleemhead, 1995
Lindley, David
“Twango Bango III”
and Wally Ingram: DL, 2003
Lindley, David
“Twango Bango Deluxe”
and Wally Ingram: (UlfTone, 2003)
Lindley, David
“Twango Bango II”
and Wally Ingram: DL, 2001
Lindvall, Olle:
“Olle Lindvall”
Drone, 2001
Lyslo, Øyvind og “Syngjande Strenger”
Arne M. Sølvberg: Heilo, 1990
Manx, Harry:
“Road Ragas”
Dog My Cat Records, 2004
Marsh, Warne:
“Sax of a Kind”
Hot Club Records, 1983
Mehldau, Brad w.
Pat Metheny:
“Mehldau Metheny”
Nonesuch, 2006
Metheny, Pat w.
Lyle Mays and
Naná
Vasconcelos:
“As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls”
ECM, 1981
Metheny, Pat:
“Letter From Home”
Geffen, 1989
Metheny, Pat:
“Offramp”
ECM, 1982
184
Molvær, Nils
Petter:
“ER”
Sula, 2005
Montgomery, Wes “Smokin´ At The Half Note”
with Wyntin Kelly Verve, 2005
Trio:
NorDan:
“Agram”
ECM, 1996
Nyhus, Sven:
“Norwegian Fiddle Music”
Schanachie, 1992
Økland, Nils:
“Bris”
Økland, Nils:
“Bris”
Over Stok og
Steen:
“Frekke Fyrer”
Kvarts, 2007
Parker, Charlie:
“The Essence of Charlie Parker”
Delta, 2008
Pastorius, Jaco:
“Jaco Pastorius”
Sony, 1976 / 2000
Pereira, Júlio:
“Geografias”
Som Livre, 2007
Reiersrud, Knut:
“Tramp”
Kirkelig Kulturverksted, 1993
Saluzzi, Dino:
“Juan Condori”
ECM, 2006
Schönberg,
Arnold:
“Pierrot Lunaire”
Teldec, 1998
185
Seglem, Karl:
“Urbs”
NorCd, 2006
Shankar, Ravi:
“Sangeet Sartaj”
Living Media India Ltd., 2005
Simpson, Martin:
“The Prodigal Son”
Topic, 2007
Slinkombas:
“Slinkombas”
Grappa, 1979
Stern, Mike:
“Is What It Is”
Atlantic, 1994
Stern, Mike:
“Who Let The Cats Out?
Mike Stern, 2006
Stubseid, Gunnar:
“Gorrlaus”
Grappa, 2008
Sylvian, David:
“Blemish”
Samadhisound UK, 2003
Tristano, Lennie:
“Abstraction and Improvisation”
El Records, 2007
Various Artists:
“Eg er liten eg, men eg vågar meg”
Heilo, 1985
Various Artists:
“Norsk Folkemusikk: Gamle Folkemusikkinstrument –
Langeleik – Slåttestev og Slått”
Talik, 2009
Various Artists:
“Fille-Vern – Gamle og nye mestere i norsk
munnharpetradisjon”
Talik, 2006
186
Various Artists:
“Norsk Rocks Historie”
Universal, 2004
Various Artists:
“The Imagined Village”
Real World, 2007
Väsen:
“Gront”
Xource Records, 1999
Vaughan, Stevie
Ray:
“Collections”
Sony BMG Canada, 2005
Walsh, Colin:
“Dupré, Langlais and Messiaen: Organ Music”
Guild/BFM, 2004
Westberg, Tron
Steffen:
“Bortover all vei”
2L, 2002
Willemark, Lena:
“Älvdalens Elektriska”
Bonnier, 2006
Zorn, John:
“Naked City”
Nonesuch / Warner, 1990
187
AKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Geir Egil Larsen (for sharing the cultural capital that defines him, free of
prejudice and expectations)
Mai-Britt Larsen (for fantastic homemade food, conversation and
background noises on the recordings from my lessons)
Einar Olav Larsen (for showing such generosity in sharing tunes and
knowledge)
Sturla Eide (for everything he teaches me every day, and for sharing tunes,
cars, conversations, stubborn optimism and for bringing me to England)
John Pål Inderberg (a legendary jazz musician and educator whose school of
thought is more than anything a way of perceiving other human beings and
what they´re able to hear – whether they know it or not. He has made me
interested in what music history sounds like rather than what´s been written
about it – and he shares my love for aquavit and musical conversation)
Carl Haakon Waadeland (for sharing his vast knowledge of Norwegian
traditional drumming and for trying to make me understand the
sophistication of his rhythmic world)
Jon Rune Strøm (my bass player, whose melodic sense, rock-solid
perception of time and empathic demeanour made me wonder often if they´d
given the research money to the wrong guy)
Tore Aaen Aune (for loyalty, wonderful flute playing and an impressive
curiosity. He´s also a hunter and a fantastic cook)
Bjørn Aksdal (for his lifelong commitment to unearthing new and exciting
aspects of traditional music from Trøndelag and Jämtland, and for sharing
his insights with me)
Gunnar Andreas Berg (for giving the artists on his record label the chance to
work until everybody´s happy – and for teaching me everything I think I
know about guitar playing when I was young)
Arnt Rian (for doing something that´s never been done before every time he
builds me one of his unbelievable guitars)
Tony Francis (for building me the vanilla-scented Weissenborn in New
Zealand)
David Spelman (for taking time from his insane schedule and sharing his
thoughts about the New York Guitar festival with me)
My parents, Monica and Asbjørn Aase (because our family home has always
had time for ruminations, thoughts, ideas and stories)
Stein Bratland at Skansen Lydstudio (for being a flexible and intelligent
sparring partner in recording situations)
188
But most of all, Ingrid Eftedal, my love and my companion through thick
and thin. She and her two jewels Ane and Anders are what made this project
possible, in every sense.
189

ANDREAS AASE (Department of Music, NTNU): DOCUMENTATION

Transcription

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